


The Light of a Cold Sun

by Banhus



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-06-22 11:16:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15580764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Banhus/pseuds/Banhus
Summary: Stamets doesn't make the final jump into the Mirror Dimension. Burnham and Tyler are given a terrible gift. The war with the Klingons goes on.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Goes AU at the end of 'Into the Forest I Go'. I started writing this (at an amazingly slow pace!) before Lorca was revealed to be from the Mirror Dimension. The version of Lorca in this fic is tagged as Mirror Lorca because the characterisation is based on the Lorca who turned out to be Mirrorverse, though there is no actual mention of it in the story.

The night air of Pleiad VI was warm and dry as a spring evening on Vulcan, and Michael allowed herself a quick luxuriant stretch between patients. Beside her, Lieutenant Tyler - _Ash_ , she thought to herself - had fallen into an easy, unhurried rhythm. He brushed the sleeve up a colonist’s wrist, said something low and comforting if they looked frightened. Then, the small pneumatic hiss of the hypo, and he’d wave the next person in line up. They’d been vaccinating colonists for hours; the medical crew dealt with actual cases of the illness, but everyone on a starship knew how to use a hypo, and the quicker they inoculated the population, the quicker they could get back to the war. 

Michael gently bumped her shoulder against Tyler’s, and he shot her a quick smile before bending back to his work. She left her shoulder pressed against his, marvelling a little at the fact that she could get away with it. He was warm, even through his uniform, and they were doing the kind of uncomplicated good work that always reminded Michael of how Captain Georgiou would speak of Starfleet. Reflexively, Michael picked at the tangle of emotions in her chest. Vulcan training required her to be able to identify, isolate and justify feelings before they overwhelmed her. She couldn’t shield them away, not like a true Vulcan. That was no excuse to fall prey to illogic, however, and identification was the first step toward rationality. _I am content,_ she thought, _I am grateful, to be here, to experience this. I am sad that Philippa isn’t._

Michael held out her hand for the next colonist, and a tall, pale woman settled on the opposite side of the table. She was pale, the color of old ivory in the yellow lamplight, and wore a long, grey linen dress. Lightly, she nestled her hand in Michael’s upturned palm. 

Despite her degree in xenoanthropology, Michael had never really understood Saru’s sense of death. Some concepts didn’t translate across species barriers; couldn’t be understood unless you experienced them first hand. Michael grew up sensing Vulcan telepathy in images, in tastes and technicolor synaesthesia, because she lacked the neural pathways to interpret it in a Vulcan manner. Likewise, when she’d asked Saru about the way he flinched away from danger, he’d frowned at her thoughtfully, and then told her that he couldn’t really explain. 

“Try,” she’d asked.

“It’s like...” he’d fiddled thoughtfully with the ridges on the back of his head. “Like everything comes at you from upwind. You can smell predators. You feel them watching you. There’s something out there that wants something from you you’re not willing to give them.” Saru had given a small shiver, and then changed the subject. 

It hadn’t made sense to her at all, back then. With infinite caution, Michael withdrew her hand, and across the table, the woman looked at her with eyes as wide and dark as bracken pools. 

“You’re not here for the vaccine,” Michael said.

The woman inclined her head slightly. Her breath misted in the air, silver and cold. No-one else seemed to notice. 

“You’re not... What _are_ you?”

“I’m here for you,” she said, “and him.” She smiled at Tyler with pointer teeth than a human ought to have, rows and rows of perfectly opalescent triangles. Michael slowly reached for her phaser. Beside her, Tyler had tucked his left hand into his sleeve in a casual motion, watching the woman with studied indifference.

The woman neatly folded her hands in her lap. “I’m here to thank you. My colony was dying. People stopped bringing me presents. People stopped making interesting choices. Everything became so - reduced. Only illness and death and dead ends.”

“But we fixed it,” Tyler said. “Glad to help. We’ve still got a bunch of vaccines to go, so perhaps we could have this conversation later -?”

“No. I owe you.” The woman made a face as though she’d eaten something distasteful. “So I’ll give you one answer each. You don’t have to bring me anything.”

“Answers?” Tyler asked, and the woman shrugged gracefully.

“There’s a path that leads to what you each most desire. I can show it to you.”

That sounded overwrought - anachronistic, almost - to Michael, and she nearly casually asked the woman for directions to the final digit of pi. Then she stopped, watching as the colonists walked past the woman. Stamets and Culber were a table down, bickering softly to one another as they unpacked new hypos, standing close enough their shoulders brushed. They were ignoring the woman, Michael, and Tyler, not out of disinterest, but as though they weren’t even aware they were present. Space, Michael had realised since joining Starfleet was not just big, but deeper than the mind could contain; endless layers of universes stacked atop one another, existences whose mere presence could barely be glimpsed at the edge of human comprehension. Instead of asking, she paused, and thought. _Just in case._

After a few moments, she took a deep breath. “Assuming I maintain my current moral objections and goals, each goal being assigned a numerical value according to the priority I place on them, which is added to a total when completed, which course of action would lead to my achieving the highest possible total number without violating any of my moral objections?”

Tyler snorted. “Smart.”

“Vulcans _love_ logic puzzles.”

“Only the one desire,” the woman pointed out mildly. “And you want vengeance for Philippa.”

“You don’t know what I want,” Michael snapped, knee-jerk. Vengeance was _illogical_. It fixed nothing, healed nothing, was salt-water to grief’s thirst. She did not want vengeance for Philippa because she was a product of Vulcan and Starfleet both, and better than that. 

“You want it all the same,” the woman said gently. She turned to Tyler. “ _You_ \- you don’t know what you want. How _singular,_ ” she said, mouth opening in a toothy smile, enjoying a private joke. “You’ll have to settle for vengeance as well.” 

There was the soft, electric buzz of a phaser powering up to kill right behind Michael’s head. She whipped to the side out of pure instinct. Her back slammed into the table as she pivoted oddly. Her wrist was pinned to the table by the woman, fingers rough against her skin. Captain Lorca was standing half a meter away, phaser trained on the woman. Next to her, Ash was also held against the table, seemingly paralysed, with his free hand half-raised in a gesture Michael recognised as the beginning of a Suus Mahna lock she’d shown him. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t move, and she was suddenly cold, shivering horrendously as waves of ice ticked through her, carrying fragmentary thoughts to her on each crest - _seveneightthreepointninetotheeigth_ -

“Let them go,” said Lorca. “Now.”

_threehundredeightyoverx_

Ash’s head lolled forwards on his chest. 

_fivetwozeroonefourfourfour_ \- the numbers solidified into meaningless equations, each clear in her mind’s eye, and the cold receded down her arm, each wave lapping a little lower, the tide going out. 

“Yes,” said the woman, and let them go. 

Michael blinked at her hands, which were empty, and tried to stand up. There was something very important - dizzily, she sat back down, and couched her head in her hands with a groan.

“ _Discovery_ , this is Captain Lorca, beam all non-essential personnel aboard,” Lorca said from somewhere above her. Then, she was sitting on the familiar slick surface of a transporter pad, head still in her hands, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Off to her left, Tyler was trying to be discreet about retching up his lunch. 

“I request permission to visit sickbay, Captain,” Michael gritted out. “I am not feeling good. Really not good.” 

“It’ll pass in a few moments. I’ll beam us to my quarters once Lieutenant Tyler stops being a threat to my carpet. Hold tight, Burnham.”

A few very awkward moments passed in silence. The ground began to feel slightly more solid under her. Tyler let out a very small ‘ugh’ sound. She closed her eyes, and set her hands gently against the floor as its texture changed from smooth to soft. 

She heard Lorca move away from them, opening a drawer in his desk, and looked around. They were at one end of Lorca’s office, sitting propped up against a wall on a large woven rug. A set of chairs bracketed a table in the corner, and Tyler was leaning his forehead against the arm of one of them, still vaguely green. His hair stuck a little to the sweat of his forehead, and Michael reached out and brushed it free for him. 

“Hey,” Michael whispered. “Are you alright?” 

“I’m fine,” Tyler said, making a valiant effort to look up at her. “Are you?”

“My head hurts,” she admitted. 

Lorca returned, crouching down in front of them with half a glass of something amber in each hand. He pressed one of the glasses into Michael’s hand, passing the other to Tyler. 

“Drink it,” he ordered them. “It’ll help. Then you’re going to tell me exactly what happened down on the planet, and what you asked the Norn for.”

“The -” Michael began. Lorca cut her off with an impatient wave towards her drink. She obediently took a gulp. Tyler had bolted down his whiskey the moment Lorca asked him to, and was sitting a little straighter. He turned his empty glass over in his hands as he explained to Lorca what had happened, pausing once he reached the point where the Norn had grabbed their wrists.

“I don’t know, Captain,” he said. “Everything went cold. Some sort of defensive mechanism, probably.” 

Lorca narrowed his eyes for a moment, then casually turned to Michael. “What about you, Specialist?”

“It went cold, like Lieutenant Tyler said, and, ah. I started seeing numbers. Equations. I don’t know what they mean. They seem random, but they’re very complex, and elegant - more elegant than I’d expect from a hallucination. The Norn said she owed us. I think they were her way of paying us back.”

Lorca sat down properly, leaned back against the legs of a chair. It was almost surreal; Michael had a well-developed sense for the inherent theatrics of being a captain, the tiny ways Georgiou had quietly gone about confirming her authority and reassuring those under her command. Lorca was more ostentatious about it than Georgiou had been - a slightly grander desk, centred on the door, taking a little longer cutting to the chase when speaking to her - still, he was good at it, subtle. She almost forgot he was doing it, most of the time. Legs stretched out before him on the rug, blinking tiredly into the soft yellow light overhead, Captain Lorca was superimposed with a quietly bitter man Burnham felt was suddenly unfamiliar.

“Norns don’t feel duty in that sense. More likely it couldn’t resist the urge to meddle with my crew. Maybe it even lured us here with that illness.” He sighed. “It’ll be your choice what to do with those equations when the time comes, and if I know that beast right, it will come at a damn inconvenient moment. You should know what you’re dealing with though. I’ll rely on both your discretions about this.”

“Of course,” Tyler said. 

Michael didn’t say anything, but she supposed she didn’t have to. Lorca wouldn’t tell her anything that would chafe at her sense of duty to keep quiet; she had a sneaking suspicion that he kept secrets from her for precisely that reason. 

“My mother’s side of the family’s from this sector,” said Lorca. “Not that many people know. It’s a godforsaken backwater of a colony. My grandmother moved to Earth first chance she got. She used to tell me about the early colonists coming out here, people who’d settled up all their accounts back home, who didn’t have much to stay for, getting out here and finding out that the planet wasn’t empty. Starfleet regulations would have had them all quarantined and shipped back, so they decided maybe the Norn was just human, after all.”

“She wasn’t human,” said Tyler quietly. 

“It started to look more human after a while. It only ever appeared alone, and kept to itself - who’s to say it wasn’t just some post survivor from an exploratory probe gone astray?” Lorca said. “It got to where people would take it little gifts, my grandmother said. A chicken, or a deer, and they’d tell you what you wanted to know, or make sure your son got back from Starbase safely.”

Michael nodded. “Attempting to influence chance by appealing to a higher power is a common behaviour -”

“It worked,” Lorca said, getting up. He wandered over to his desk. “Every time, it worked. That’s the damned problem with it. People set out a gift, if it got accepted, you got your - answer, or opportunity, or whatever. People don’t usually want what’s good for them, and the Norns had a knack for choosing things that went very, very badly, in the end. I don’t know what they get out of it. Might just enjoy having people pay them for the rope to hang themselves. If I had my way the entire colony would be evacuated tomorrow.” Lorca poured himself a drink, and raised briefly at them. “There’s a war on, though, so no ships for that. And Norns are harder to neutralise than they look. They can tell when you’re coming.”

Michael blinked at him, trying to process. “They must be telepaths, of some sort. Possibly they operate at a different quantum level, where they can visualise different causal chains from inhabiting multiple layers of a stacked multiverse -”

“They grant wishes?” Tyler broke in. “They grant _wishes_ and Starfleet _doesn’t know about this?”_

“My thought exactly.” Lorca said bitterly. “The local population won’t tell Starfleet for fear of both evacuation, and word spreading to people who aren’t sufficiently wary of how wrong their wishes can go - according to my grandmother, anyway, and what did she know. No, once the war with the Klingons broke out, I thought, how easy would it be if someone smart enough, someone who truly wanted to win that war, asked for the right thing -” Lorca started rummaging through one of the desk drawers. “I gave it thirty percent of my eye-sight as a gift. It wouldn’t disqualify me from Starfleet and it got to see the universe through the synaptic nerves she controls now, may it rot in its bog forever.”

“Captain,” said Tyler, standing up laboriously. “You made a deal with that - thing? You let it in your body?” He looked torn between horror and empathy. 

“It seemed worth it,” Lorca said pulling out a slip of paper, and looking at it. “How do I win the war? Millions of lives saved.” 

Michael thought it over. “Oh no,” she said quietly.

“I thought you might realise when I heard about your first question,” Lorca said. “It was a good try. Shame she went straight for the human lurking under all that Vulcan training. Care to let Lieutenant Tyler know where I went wrong?”

“How do _I_ win the war,” she said. “If she decided to take you literally, the question would not search for the most expedient or the optimal route to end the conflict, but rather -”

“-one where _I_ got all the glory in the end, even if it costs us a few planets and decades along the way to make that happen. Right in one. I overlooked that, and it cost me my ship, my crew -”

He handed the paper to Tyler, who mutely took it. Michael went over, and read over his arm. _Paul Stamets. Michael Burnham. Ash Tyler._

“The _sine qua non_ of my war effort, apparently,” Lorca said. “That was what she gave me. That was _all_ she gave me. Two hours later I warped the _Buran_ directly into a firefight because it was the quickest way to get back to Earth for my new top-priority scientist and I thought I was invincible.”

“You did what you thought was right,” Tyler said, gripping the paper tight enough to crumple. “You were trying to do the right thing. There was no way you could know.”

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the crew of the _Buran_.” Outside the window, Pleiad IV was just visible where the ship hull gave way to transparent aluminium, a faint line of green and silver below. Michael watched Lorca blink at if for a few moments before he continued. “Trying to do the right thing is a platitude. How many Starfleet officers who have made gross tactical errors costing thousands of lives were just _trying to do the right thing?_ Maybe someone dead on the _Buran_ could have ended the war by now, and they died for me to get my shot. That is why I am telling you all this. Not so we can all feel sad and hold hands and tell ourselves that we’ll try and do the right thing. I know you both will _try_. I don’t care. I just want you to remember that when the time comes for those damn equations, or the thing you’re not telling me about, _Lieutenant_ \- you could be buying your glory with the lives of every single person on this ship. Do I make myself clear?”

Michael had stiffened into parade rest, her hands twisted up together out of sight behind her back. She would never feel that she’d made the right choices at the battle of the Binaries, could never allow herself that illusion; there were so many dead, and _Philippa_ \- some people marked your katra forever, Sarek had told her. Some entanglements persisted after the other katra was gone, taking part of who you were with them. She’d tried to do the right thing, and Lorca had reassured her: universal law is for lackeys. She knew he’d been trying to convince her to sign on, but she’d seized on it all the same; approval from a Captain, even if not _her_ Captain.

Tyler was saying something to Lorca, and barely caught the end of it “- will let you know, Captain.” 

Lorca shooed them off, and she was halfway down the hallway before Tyler caught up with her.

“Michael -”

“I’m alright,” she forced out. “Can we - talk about this later? I promised Stamets I’d help him wrap up in the labs once we were done vaccinating.”

Ash nodded mutely, and she wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, just wanting the reassurance of feeling him warm underneath her fingertips. He pulled her in by the hips and rested his forehead against hers. She breathed out, and tried to focus on the moment as it was. 

\--

Michael helped Stamets tidy, then went back to her quarters, scrubbed off briefly in the fresher, and tried to sleep. Tilly was happily unconscious in the far bed, one leg dangling off the side, having kicked off her blanket sometime ago. After staring at the ceiling for near an hour, Burnham padded over to Tilly, tugged the blanket back over her, and left for Ash’s quarters. He’d given her his access code after Pahvo, and she’d slept on his couch the three nights L’Rell had been in the ship’s brig before her transfer, wondering if she should wake him when he spoke or cried out in his sleep. She’d slept there twice since then, after particularly hard missions, and once in his bed when she’d taken a bad knock to the head during a firefight and gotten concussed. He’d settled on the covers next to her and carefully woken her up every hour, asked her the name of a crew member, kissed her, and told her to go back to sleep. 

Michael keyed in his code, toed off her boots inside the door, and headed for the couch. The covers rustled a little as Ash sat up abruptly.

“It’s just me,” she whispered. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither,” he said, and moved over a little. The sheet crested into small starlight-capped mountain ranges where he’d drawn up his knees. Michael walked over slowly, and hung the uniform jacket she’d thrown on over her _Disco_ t-shirt neatly on his desk chair. She watched her hands smooth down the raised silver bars on the shoulders, feeling oddly distant from herself. Everything seemed hyperreal and very quiet. Ash had laid back down, and was staring at the ceiling, bleary-eyed. His t-shirt had a small hole at the neck where wear had torn it; she recognised the soft grey cloth from a training session. As she laid down, she touched the sleeve, wanting to see if it felt as soft as it had been. She’d been pressed up against Ash’s chest, she remembered, trying to lean just far enough out that she could sweep his leg, his breath warm and quick against her cheek. Her fingers tightened around his shoulder in a quick twitch as the memory hit, and Ash twisted around on his side, watching her, eyes very soft before her drew her in and kissed her. 

They hadn’t spoken about it, the way they took care to stay dressed around each other, how Ash kept his hands on Michael’s back, face, hips, the way he pulled away sometimes, breathing in controlled patterns Michael recognised from her meditation sessions. Michael wanted him, sometimes with a fierce intensity she’d never experienced before, an illogical hunger to dissolve into him and devour him all at once when he touched her, or smiled, or did something casually kind. It was what it was, though, _kaiidth_ , and she would rather lie in the dark on Ash’s couch, listening to him plead in his sleep, wanting to punch something out of grief and love and sheer, breathtaking anger over what he’d been made to suffer rather than make him relive the past. 

Yet she couldn’t feel any hesitation in the way Ash slid one hand up her ribs, around her back to press her against him, chest to thigh, and cupped her face in the other, fingertips cool against the edge of her jaw. Each time he kissed her was a small shock; a tiny contraction in her chest at the fleshy reality of his mouth, the way his beard scraped against her chin, the softness of his mouth. He didn’t let up this time, though, kept his lips slanted against hers as the initial jolt changed, became something else entirely, and she slid a hand through his silky hair as their teeth clacked together because they were both moving too hard and desperately for any skill. The weight of his body rolled her a little to the side, and he capitalised on it, winding a leanly muscled leg between hers. His hand fluttered against her hip, a moment of hesitation. Gently, she disentangled their legs, brought his hand to her lips and kissed it before yawning and pillowing her head in the indent of his shoulder. 

As a teenager on Vulcan, Michael had always been singularly aware that she was an impostor. She was sloshy with emotion, a cup running over, and alternately thrilled by the new range of emotional responses that opened up and mortified by how little she could moderate them. Ash made her feel the same way, like her body was too small to keep it all in; it kept spilling out in the way her face arraigned itself without permission, the way her skin pebbled when he looked at her. There was a little shame to it, a strange reluctance to make herself so vulnerable, an inherent greediness in wanting so badly what she couldn’t keep. Still, Ash kept matching her, vulnerability for vulnerability, and she couldn’t find it in herself to say _no_ , to say, _I will go to prison when all this is over, and you deserve someone who can stay for you._

Gently, she ran her fingertips along the lines of his arm. The stars brushed past them in the dark outside the window, clearer than they’d ever been on Vulcan. Burnham’s officer’s quarters on the _Shenzhou_ had had a grand window like this, and she’d pushed her bed across the room to fall asleep cataloguing the pinpricks of light. So much variance she’d never seen - reddish and golden and pure white, galaxies dripping down across the sky like lit paths - 

“I lied to Lorca,” Ash said, as she was almost asleep. “I remember what the Norn showed me.” 

“I know,” Michael blinked and craned her head back to look at him. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want - the Norn offered you vengeance, so I assumed it was L’Rell, and - not pleasant. Perhaps.”

“I don’t know what it is,” Ash said. “I don’t want it to be L’Rell. I don’t want there to be any unfinished business between us. I don’t want there to be a debt of vengeance. I want nothing to do with her.” 

“I know. I’m not sure that matters. I don’t understand,” Michael admitted. “I got my vengeance for Philippa. I killed T’Kuvma. It just didn’t matter at all. And I know that, but I still... The Norn still thought I wanted more.”

“Are you really only seeing equations?” Ash asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what they are. They could be for anything. You didn’t get equations...?” Michael asked.

“No. I got - you know when you get a song stuck in your head? It’s like that.”

Michael nodded. Ash’s chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. He smelled nice: a little like sweat, and Starfleet detergent. 

“I can’t remember where it’s from, and I can’t remember the words, just -” he made a vague gesture in the air. “I feel like I heard it when I was a kid or something.” 

“It can’t be that bad, then. A lullaby, maybe.” 

“No, it’s not soothing, it’s... rhythmic, maybe. There’s a pattern, like one of the songs for games where someone sings a line, and then you’re supposed to clap hands, or jump over a rope, or say something, and the line keeps repeating because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” 

“According to Lorca, that’s good,” Michael pointed out. “We’re not supposed to know. It’ll only end badly.” She frowned. “I wonder what the evolutionary purpose of that is. Maybe the Norns want to cause more fear, so more people will seek them out for their problems. Maybe they don’t prioritise like humans, and understand what causes us grief. Maybe the Buran would have been destroyed no matter what, and Lorca was just unlucky.” 

“You don’t believe that,” said Ash. 

“I don’t. I want to.”

“I’m scared,” he admitted. “I still wake up, thinking I’m on that Klingon prison ship. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m scared that it has.”

“You’re _here_ ,” Michael said, wrapping her fingers around his wrist. “You’re with me, and they can’t have you. I didn’t leave you on the Ship of the Dead, and I would never leave you stuck on the prison ship either.” 

“Mmm, Vulcan possessiveness,” Ash said, yawning. Michael stole his pillow, accused him of cultural insensitivity when he tried to take it back, and promptly went to sleep. 

\--

Michael had gone to see L’Rell, the day before she was transferred to a ship that would take her to some secret Federation prison. She hadn’t told Ash about it, nor asked anyone’s permission. The security officer on duty let her through immediately with the sort of unquestioning approval she occasionally got after the Battle of the Binary Stars. She’d tried to fire first on the Klingons; some of Landry and Lorca’s officers would flick grim smiles at her and clap her on the shoulder. It was worse, even, than being Burnham the Mutineer, that she should be let in to see the Klingon prisoner so easily. Still, she went, and stood in front of the force field sealing off L’Rell, and tried to understand. 

L’Rell had her back to her, spine very straight, and for a moment Michael was the woman the security officer saw her as, all vicious howling violence that this being should hurt Ash so, _her Ash_ , her ship, her _Philippa_ \- 

She’d killed T’Kuvma, and it had been personal and general both, the killing of the man who killed Georgiou, and the killing of every Klingon she could get her hands on. L’Rell was muttering something under her breath, repetitive and soft. Michael locked her hands together behind her back to keep them from trembling, and watched. After a while, L’Rell turned and stood to face her. Michael tilted up her chin, tried to school her face into the perfect Vulcan impassiveness Sarek had taught her. She’d hoped for - she didn’t know what she’d hoped for, something to make her feel less helpless, perhaps, when Ash cried out in his sleep. In person, L’Rell was imposingly tall and broad, the angry mass of scar tissue on the left side of her face obscuring the tapering ridges and beginning crow’s feet around her right eye. 

Biting back against her fury, Michael placed a careful hand against the force field, faint hum reverberating through her skin. 

“Michael Burnham, who killed T’Kuvma,” L’Rell said, it sounded faintly odd, and Michael realised that it wasn’t coming through the universal translator. L’Rell spoke Standard.

“Why are you here, Michael, daughter of Sarek?” L’Rell looked down at her, an odd gleam in her eye. “ _A terrible secret cannot be kept?_ ” she swapped briefly to Klingon, and the translator picked it up while she paused, watching Michael carefully for a moment, then continuing. “Kahless said this. I know who you are, and what you have done. What do you want?”

Michael met her gaze. “You’ll be put on trial. You will be treated decently. I thought it might reassure you that Starfleet does not torture its prisoners.” 

L’Rell shrugged, and returned to her bench. “It means little to me. I am Klingon. We endure what we must to act honourably, and I shall act honourably no matter what you ask me to endure.”

“There’s no _honour_ in what you’ve done -” Michael hissed, clenching her hand against the barrier, but L’Rell had already turned her back on her, and was muttering softly in Klingon again: _Kahless, give me light, that I might see the path you have laid before me. Kahless, bend all roads at my feet, that they lead to your will alone. Kahless, what light is but your light -_

Michael turned to leave, then looked back. “ _Tilek svi’khaf-spol t’vathu, tilek svi’sha’veh,_ ” she said. “Surak said this.” _The spear in the other’s heart is the spear in your own._ A warning to L’Rell, a warning to herself. 

\--

In the three months following Pahvo, it had become painfully clear to everyone aboard the _Discovery_ how frantically outmatched they’d been at the beginning of the war. Even with the ability to break Klingon cloaking, Federation ships were still slower and clumsier than their Klingon counterparts, and every week brought new losses, new gaps in the chain of defence along the Klingon border. Michael split her days between desperately going through captured Klingon tech, trying to piece together an understanding of what made their drives and weapons work, and helping Tilly and Stamets adapt the spore drive to work without a human component. 

Neither project was meeting with much success, and even Tilly was noticeably wilted, picking up faint dark circles under her eyes from the long nights. Stamets still twitched at private visions, and the lack of sleep seemed to make it worse; he would fade in and out of the half-world no-one else could see. He’d had taken to falling asleep in the mycoboretum, cheek propped against his PADD, and whenever he did Culber would march in a few hours later, throw his hands up exasperatedly, and force the entire team to go to their quarters and sleep. It wasn’t enough. Results weren’t trickling in fast enough, and Culber fetched Stamets later and later, as the _Discovery_ jumped in to find more ships gone, more outposts destroyed. 

A week after Pleiad VI, Michael sat at her terminal in the spore lab, watching Tilly cradle a cup of coffee as if it were her firstborn child. Doctor Culber and CMO Enythek were examining the ports in Stamets’ arms over his loud complaints that he was fine, they should stop fussing, and worse, slowing down the progress of _science_ \- 

“It might help us figure out how you’re incompatible with the mycelium?” Tilly offered after a particularly strident demand that they unhand him. 

“Eigh _teen_ scans!” Stamets said. “Just this week! I’ve had eighteen full-body scans, you can work from that.”

“We need tissue samples, though,” Enythek said cheerfully, in her high, fluting voice. She was Ynuk, an extremely adaptable species that had reacted to encountering the Federation with such enthusiasm that scarce a hundred years later, there were barely any Ynuk that weren’t part _something_. Enythek had graceful, human hands, a bony spinal ridge that she cut special holes in her off-duty shirts to accommodate, and was six foot two of pure muscle. Stamets didn’t even try to resist as she drew a sample of blood just below his right arm implant. Instead, he looked up at Culber.

“Hugh,” he began, “handsomest of doctors, there is an excellent bottle of Saurian wine stashed in my personal locker, and you may have it, if only this unreasonable -”

Culber smiled down at Stamets, then jabbed him in the neck with a hypo while he was distracted. Enythek turned to tuck the sample into her belt pouch, and Tilly neatly added another packet of sugar to her coffee. Neither of them saw what Michael did: Culber resting his hand on Stamets’ shoulder for a moment, as it was too heavy to lift.

“Paul,” he said, in a low voice. “most frustrating of patients, please. Let me do this for you. Let me help. I’ll take that bottle of wine once you’re better, but let me help.”

“I might be convinced to share it,” Stamets said, then sighed. “You know I only - I have to do this.”

“I know,” Culber said, then clapped him on the shoulder and straightened up. “I will see you tonight, Lieutenant.”

“We’ll let you know if the tissue samples help,” said Enythek. “As soon as we can. Also, for goodness sake, sleep! Eat! Doctor Culber is too soft with you scientists. And until further notice, you may have only _three_ of these a day, Cadet,” She picked Tilly’s coffee cup out of her hands, and dropped it in the bin on her way out the door. 

“I’m healthy!” Tilly protested at the closing door. “I eat egg-white burritos!”

Culber left as Stamets and Tilly began a discussion on whether ingesting spores counted towards the recommended daily dosage of vegetables, and Michael bent to her calculations again. Even without the worry in Culber’s face, or the bright, brittle tone in which Enythek admonished them, she knew they were driving themselves too hard. They were all yoked to the pace of a war that would break them before it let up. Michael wanted it to end, wanted them all to be able to lie down and rest, and she wanted to stay, which she could only do as long as the war was still being fought, and she didn’t know what she felt. Breathing slowly out through her nose, she tried to sort through the jumble of emotion. It was pointless; she’d never had the instinctive ability to visualise her own mind, her katra, that Vulcans had. She reached for the source of her frustration, and instead, the Norn’s equations rose to the surface of her mind, perfectly remembered, intersecting golden lines traced on the inside of her eyelid like a net waiting to catch her.


	2. Chapter 2

Michael put an arm around Stamets’ waist to steady him as she and Tyler half-carried him down the mountain slope. Far above them, the Vulcan laboratory on Iridin was still smouldering, the orange glow casting long shadows from the boulders littering the ground. Michael was limping from a shallow cut to the leg, and she could feel the warm blood soaking into the lining of her boot. 

“How much farther?” she gasped.

Saru smoothed down his flaring ganglia, and looked back over his shoulder at her. “Fifty-two kilometres until we are out of the shielded zone and can contact _Discovery._ ”

“We’re not going to make it,” Tyler said. “Stamets is barely conscious. We couldn’t walk five kilometres more, let alone fifty. Is there a way to take down the shielding so _Discovery_ can beam us up?” 

“No,” said Michael. “The shield generator is hardwired into the foundations of Mount Magu and powered by geothermic energy. It’s designed to be impossible to shut off as a safety measure - they’re not just there to stop people beaming in, they’re there to stop classified technology being beamed _out_. Any safety override would be exploitable.”

They’d been sent to retrieve the classified data at the outpost before the Klingons could access it. While they’d been too late to prevent the scientists being taken as prisoners or killed, at least they’d managed to steal the data core before the Klingons found it. Michael had recognised most of the outpost layout. She’d spent her early childhood on a scientific outpost much like Iridin, and Vulcans tended to build for efficiency over variation. She had dragged the cube out from a control panel in the dark, trying to make as little sound as possible. It was reinforced against water, heat, and decompression, and was heavy as sin. Saru had tucked into the backpack he’d brought without complaint, but the weight was clearly wearing on him. Worse, their shuttle had been discovered by the Klingons shortly after they landed; they were hunted, and would have to walk out. 

“The canyon we flew over coming in is two kilometres south of here,” Saru said, hefting his pack and wincing. “If we can get Stamets there, you two will stay and guard the core while I run for help.”

“That works,” Tyler said, adjusting his arm around Stamets’ waist. He looked at Burnham over the top of Stamets’ head, which had lolled onto her shoulder. 

“Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

“Adequate.” 

“I’m going to give Stamets an injection of adrenaline. We need him to be able to move, now, and we don’t have time to figure out why he’s hallucinating until we’re back on _Discovery_. Do you need one as well? You were limping after those Klingons surprised us.”

“My leg got cut,” she admitted. “It’s nothing serious. I can run.” 

Tyler nodded, then fished a hypo out of his tricorder case and depressed it into Stamets’ shoulder. Stamets rightened himself a little. 

“You’ve got to move, Paul,” Tyler muttered, and began guiding him after Saru. “We’re going back to _Discovery_ , and you’ve got to help us.”

“This is new,” Stamets told him. “Where’s Hugh? There are so many skeins-” he kept up a non-stop mumbling commentary that faded into white noise as Burnham stumbled along, retreating into a daze. Iridin was warmer that she was used to, a little warmer than Vulcan, and her feet kept sinking into the black sand between the irregular rock outcroppings. She kept her eyes on the ground, relying on Tyler to keep them on course, and focused on mechanically pushing through the heat and exhaustion with each step. Occasionally she’d stumble, or Stamets would, and the jolt of pain from her leg would rouse her for a little, and she’d look back over her shoulder at the burning laboratory before she fell back into a stupor. Stamets walked mostly under his own power at first, but as the gorge came into view on the horizon, he dragged his feet more and more, until he simply slumped into unconsciousness. His weight pitched forwards, and Ash grunted as he shifted his arm to compensate. Michael kept walking, pulled down by Stamets, aching all over. 

“Here,” said Saru, after what seemed like an eternity. “Wait here, and I will have the _Discovery_ send back a shuttle for you.”

Ahead of them, the ground dropped off steeply into a gorge. A thin line of silver snaked its way along the bottom, lined with what looked like small, purple shrubs. The uneven lip of the gorge was lined with large plates of a rough black rock, several of which formed shelves where they protruded over the layer beneath. One of the shelves was about a meter in height, and half-hidden on one side by a purple shrub. Tyler propped Stamets against the back wall underneath it.

“I’ll come with you,” he said to Saru. “If they see you...” 

Saru put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “You would slow me down, Lieutenant. My species -”

“- can run eighty kilometres an hour.” Michael and Tyler finished in chorus.

Michael unclipped her water flask from her belt and handed it to Saru. “Be careful.”

Sombrely, he took it from her, then bounded off, half-sliding, half-running into the gorge. Michael crawled under the shelf and stretched out her legs next to Stamets’. He was still breathing, his vitals within acceptable parameters, according to her tricorder, though the adrenaline jolt that had gotten him that far had worn out. His eyes were shut, and his skin was flushed a mottled red. She didn’t know what was wrong; he’d been fine, and then he’d been hit by a mild electrical jolt from a broken control panel as he tried to lock a door against the pursuing Klingons. The door had jammed shut, and Stamets had keeled over as if struck, then woken up reeling, speaking nonsense. Culber could fix him, Michael told herself. Culber would fix him, if only they could get him back to sickbay.

Tyler passed his water flask to Burnham, and she took a deep swig from it. It was lukewarm and the pervasive smell of sulphur and smoke that had settled in her clothes and hair made it taste oddly burnt. Still, illogically, she thought she could almost feel it soak through her parched body, rousing her a little from her stupor. She handed the flask back to Tyler, who drank himself, then eyed Stamets speculatively. 

“We can’t force it down his throat while he’s unconscious. The risk of him choking is too great,” she said.

“I know. I’d feel better if he drank something, but this’ll have to do.” Tyler poured some of the water over Stamets’ head, and pulled out his breastplate a little to soak some into the front of his uniform shirt. The water bloomed dark into the fabric around his collar. “The condensation might cool him down a little. Let me see your leg?”

Michael poked him in the hip with the toe of her boot, and he caught her around the calf and gently slid her uniform trouser up to expose the cut across her shin. The blood had dried in branching lines down the shinbone, like the tributaries of a river. As she watched, a fresh, brighter line of red cut back towards her knee in response to the new angle. 

“I don’t have the supplies to deal with this properly,” Tyler said. “I’m going to clean it out and keep pressure on it, but it’s going to have to wait for sickbay, as well.” 

She watched as he cleaned the wound with water, pulled out a tight roll of antibacterial absorbent cloth, and tried not to wince as he pressed it against her leg. He crossed his own legs, and pulled her foot into his lap. 

“Keeping it elevated,” he told her. His right hand was rough with phaser callouses, and tickled a little as he ran it comfortingly up and down her shin above the cut. 

She tilted her head and looked at him. “I suppose I can see why Stamets went for a medical officer. This is reasonably appealing.” 

Ash grinned at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. “Security officers have mandatory first aid courses every three months. Stick with me and I’ll show you some extremely attractive splinting of compound fractures.” 

Far below, Saru had crossed the stream, and was scrambling up the far side of the gorge, kicking up a small cloud of black sand as he went. They both watched him in silence for a moment as he pulled himself over the lip of the rocks and out of sight. 

“Now we wait,” Ash said under his breath. 

They’d walked to the canyon in the very last of the day’s light. They sat in the faint afterglow of the second, smaller sun setting. It was very quiet; the wind rustled in the shrubs, and below them, some animal was calling out a trilling hum. Burnham tried to catch a glimpse of it, but it was too far off, too dark. Ash checked on Stamets every few minutes, despite having rested his tricorder against Stamets’ chest, continually scanning, so that it would warn him in case Stamets’ condition changed. After manually feeling for a pulse for the third time, Ash turned to Saru’s pack, and began to rummage through it.

“There’s nothing we can do for him down here,” Michael said. “Saru will send a shuttle back. They’ll come for us.” 

“I know,” said Ash, and glanced at the empty horizon. Visibly forcing himself to think of something else, he tapped at the core casing. “What do you think is on here?”

Michael frowned. “Well, I know Doctor T’Paith was reassigned here from the academy, and she specialised in inorganic chemistry and energy signatures, so likely something to do with that. It was heavily classified, a priority Klingon target, and Starfleet was willing to divert a vital war asset to retrieve it. Speculation is illogical, but - a weapon. I think they sent us here for a weapon.” 

“Good. We’re barely keeping up with the Klingons. If they weren’t too busy snapping at each others heels for scraps of glory to fight properly, we’d have lost by now.” 

The easy contempt with which he said it sat ill with Michael. 

“I knew Doctor T’Paith,” she said after a bit. “She was one of the reasons I wanted to study at the Vulcan Science Academy. She was brilliant, of course, won the _Ri-Pafam Kla-Hil_ award for scientific competency twice. Before she was reassigned here for the war effort, she was a teacher. Sarek told me she’d turned down full-time job offers from nearly every scientific body on the planet, and only accepted her current job at the VSA once they offered her part-time. She spent her spare time working on the salt flats outside Shi´Kahr, trying to reverse the ionic damage pollution from early shuttles caused a hundred years ago. It drove the northern _ek’ash’ya_ nearly extinct - they look like small crabs about the size of the top joint of your index finger - and she wanted to save them. I want to beat the Klingons as much as you, but I don’t want it to be a weapon. T’Paith died making this; it doesn’t seem right that her legacy would be a tool of destruction. I want her to be remembered as who she chose to be, not who she had to become because of the war.” 

“Not just destruction,” Ash said. “A weapon against the Klingons would protect us. It would protect Vulcan. You’re talking as if everything that’s even related to the war is bad, but we _have to win_ , you know this - you know they won’t back down until we _make_ them bare their throat.”

“I know. I know, it’s just - I felt I did something I _had_ to at the Binaries, and it turned out -”

“You can’t stop making choices altogether because you’re scared of getting it wrong. You have to act. You have to try your best. I’m not -” Ash gestured helplessly. “We’re not worse people for having to make choices that can’t come out good. I have to believe that. I joined Starfleet because I wanted to help, and then I was tortured by Klingons, and we’re losing, Michael, we are.” He shook his head. “Who I was back on Earth, that is no longer me. I hate that the Klingons made me something else, too, I hate that, but I can’t pretend that it never happened and I’m still the same person I was. This is who we are, what we’ve got to work with.”

Michael glanced over at Stamets, then at the empty horizon.”It just seems like,” she said, “if I were a bit cleverer, or, oh, a better Vulcan, I suppose - less prone to fear and anger - I might have done better. Philippa did better, after all, she knew I was making a mistake back then. I wonder what she’d make of all this, now.” 

“You’re a good person, Michael,” Ash said quietly. “I might not always have been, but I have to believe that trying to be kind is enough. I don’t know how else to move forwards. I don’t know how to do anything at all but keep trying.”

Michael watched the bright orange afterglow of the second sun shade to deep red, stars beginning to appear over the hazy band of light. Impurities in the air from the fires and photon torpedoes made for spectacular sunsets, and she missed Philippa so much it ached, suddenly, her ability to find grace in anything, her bone-deep belief that empathy was the first law, that understanding lay at the end of every hard road. 

“Philippa always told us to remember to wonder.” Michael said. “She said that we saw so many amazing things every day in Starfleet, and we must never let it become commonplace, or we risked forgetting why we were out here at all. She had an old earth telescope and she’d sit on the observation deck, sometimes, and watch the stars through it. I told her it was illogical, and better instruments were invented, the first time I saw her do it. She told me that hundreds of years ago, people would watch the stars through it and try and understand what made the universe turn, and that she was still trying to figure out that same problem.” Michael blinked up at the flickering lights in the sky. “She said that the stars must have seemed impossibly far off then, and it helped remind her of the wonder of seeing them up close. The wonder of us getting closer to their light all the time.” 

“Every road made one, and none left in darkness,” Ash said quietly.

“A poem?” Michael asked. She didn’t recognise it, though it sounded vaguely familiar.

“I don’t know,” said Ash, then, “an ambition.” 

“I like that,” Michael said, and rested her head against his shoulder as they waited. 

—

Michael woke in sickbay on _Discovery,_ the faint citrusy smell of antiseptic telling her she was home before she even opened her eyes. She vaguely remembered the shuttle picking them up on Iridin, and falling asleep as soon as she’d buckled herself in, bone-tired. There was a soft murmur of voices down the other end of the room, and she opened her eyes and sat up. Tilly was sitting at the end of Stamets’ bed, showing him something on a holographic display, while Culber watched them with crossed arms. Stamets himself was propped up against a pillow and hooked up to an old-fashioned IV-drip, presumably because the animated gestures he was making with his hands would have dislocated the needle-free hypodermic version within seconds. Michael checked her own arms for needles, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. The gash on her shin had been perfectly regenerated, leaving smooth new skin, and she felt fully rested for the first time in months. 

“ _\- so fast._ ” said Tilly, then looked over at the sound of Michael’s bed creaking, and broke into a wide smile. “You’re awake! Michael, come see this!” 

“Give her a moment,” Culber said, motioning for her to sit back down. He picked up a tricorder and ran it over her. “How are you feeling?” 

“Good,” said Michael, stretching her arms. She was wearing a clean t-shirt and uniform pants, but was barefoot. She peered over the edge of the bed and found her boots waiting. “How’s Stamets? How’s Saru and Ash?”

“They’re fine,” Culber said. “Lieutenant Tyler woke up about an hour before you did, he’s running security drills on C-deck against my orders to get some rest. Lieutenant Commander Saru is sleeping in a private bay - Doctor Enythek’s keeping an eye on him. Apparently, he beamed back to _Discovery_ , told everyone to fetch you that instant, and then passed on the transporter pad out from a combination of exhaustion and adrenaline overload.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone moving that fast,” said Tilly, and grabbed a paper bag from Stamets bedside table. She offered it to Michael, who was still dangling her feet of the edge of her bed. “I synthesised you some grapes. Iridin is really dry, I thought you might need to get your fluids up, and grapes are tasty.” 

Michael took them, popped one in her mouth, and offered the open bag to Tilly and Culber. “Saru made it sound like kelpiens run at eighty kilometers an hour all the time.”

Tilly shrugged. “Well, yeah. Over short distances. They’re like antelopes - they go very fast and then they stop and rest as soon as they’re out of eyesight. Saru ran for like forty minutes straight.” 

“Oh,” said Michael, feeling a bit of an idiot for not realising. “Will you let me know when he’s awake? I need to say thank you.” 

“Sure thing. I left him some blueberries with Enythek,” Tilly said. 

“How come I don’t get fruit?” Stamets demanded. “I was _extremely_ heroic on Iridin.” 

“I ate your fruit as payback for scaring the life out of me,” Culber told him. “Stop trying to take your IV out.”

Michael didn’t bother sliding her feet into her boots, just padded across the room to take Tilly’s place on Stamets’ bed. Her leg muscles ached, but no more than they would after a particularly intense workout. “We were worried about you,” she told Stamets.

“Yeah,” said Stamets, the corners of his mouth sloping a little, unhappy. “I could still understand you for most of the walk. I knew what was happening. It was just that so much _else_ was happening at the same time. I think the electrical shock I got made my brain... jump tracks, so to speak. Delegate some of my consciousness to the mycelial network. It’s happened before. I can’t control it, I just see - everything. Things that aren’t real, or haven’t happened, or did happen somewhere else, and I don’t have the computing power to process it.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s _very_ frustrating. And apparently causing significant damage to my nervous system.” 

“We’ll find some way of stabilising you,” Culber told him. “We just have to find some way to mediate the gap between your way of processing and the way the tardigrade DNA works.” 

Michael had doubled up on her xenoanthropology and computing courses instead of taking advanced xenobiology, but even she knew enough to understand the difficulty of what Culber was describing. The necessary research for solving problems like that savoured dangerously of forbidden gene manipulation, and, as such, had barely progressed since the Eugenics Wars. The most recent work was done on Vulcan; requested by Sarek to create a Vulcan child that was half-human, half _Amanda,_ but merging human and Vulcan was a far cry from the difficulties in reconciling Stamets’ body to the tardigrade DNA. Vulcans and humans moved in the same dimensions, for the most part: bridging the conceptual gap between the tardigrade’s brain functions and Stamets’ was, well, a different beast altogether. 

“Tell me about your hologram,” she asked Tilly, after a moment of silence. 

“It’s your hologram, really,” Tilly said. “You brought it back. I just translated some of the data from Iridin to an easily visible interface, here -” 

She called up the hologram again, and Michael stared at the clean blue lines of some sort of mechanical blueprint hovering in the air. 

“It’s not a weapon,” she said.

“No,” said Tilly, “why, did you think -” 

Michael waved her off. “Just something I spoke to Tyler about.” 

“I guess it could be a weapon, sort of,” said Tilly dubiously. “It’s blueprints for a new warp drive. It’s not complete, so don’t get excited yet, well, get excited, but not too excited - we think it’s something similar to what the Klingons use, but better. It still runs on dilithium, but the energy signatures are much more standardised. It’s so much more efficient.”

“There are gaps,” Stamets said. “Look - here, here, and here.” He pointed at various sections of the hologram, where the blue lines faltered and the equations petered out. “It’s not going to run yet. We can hand it over to Starfleet, but we don’t have anything to fix the holes yet, all the scientists who were up to speed on this sort of thing were on Iridin. What a stupid waste.”

“We got some data off the _Ship of the Dead,_ ” Michael said slowly. “It wasn’t all information on their shields. If it’s similar to what the Klingons use, we could try and patch the holes in the drive with Klingon technology.” 

Stamets shook his head. “There wasn’t anything on their drive in the data packet. Trajectory, speed, warp capabilities, sure, but nothing on their actual engines. We’d have to have the complete schematics of an actual Klingon drive to do that, and that’s assuming we can reverse engineer their tech, which we haven’t been able to even do, so far.”

“Let’s get one,” said Tilly. “I bet we could catch a Bird of Prey. They’re very manoeuvrable, but so are we, and now we know what we’re looking for - we’d just have to cross-reference sections of the drive blueprints with similar sections of the Klingon drive to deduce functions.” 

“They have self-destruct capabilities and the Klingons will _die_ before they let us get one. If we try and catch it, it’ll explode in our hands.” Stamets said. 

“So we disable it somehow,” Tilly said, typing rapidly into her PADD. “We have to replace the mycellial drive, and we know there’s a Klingon supply train going to this sector from Qo’nos -”

“We _can’t!_ ” said Stamets. “Anything big enough to have the kind of drive we want is going to be a fully powered, fully manned Klingon Bird of Prey bent on our destruction first and their own second. Tilly, I know you want this drive to work, but there is literally no way we can do this. They’re not actual birds, you can’t just whip a net over their heads and hope for -”

Something in the back of Michael’s mind wrenched horribly. For a moment, she saw Philippa, standing on a green hill on Earth, a falcon on her wrist. Michael remembered that day - another of Philippa’s anachronisms, she’d thought at the time, rather uncharitably - and then Philippa had untied the leather strap from the falcon’s legs and they’d watched it wing its way up into the clear blue sky and that collided in her mind with the _Ship of the Dead_ as it moved silently through empty space, Stamets falling over because he’d poured half himself into another dimension - 

It was a clean snap, like a glass shattering on stone, the trap closing around her. The equations were a golden net, jesses to a bird, specs for an electrical framework that could drain all the ship’s energy into the mycellial network for a moment, just long enough to steal the drive schematics. She couldn’t un-know it. Her whole body gave a deep, spasming shudder, as if remembering the cold place the Norn had plunged her into. 

Michael opened her mouth, rasped out: “I think -” and shut it again. 

Culber reached out and grabbed her elbow. “Michael?”

The pressure of his hand on her arm brought he back into her body; the room snapped into focus, and she blinked, disoriented. Blurry lines still traced across her field of vision, like afterimages of looking into too-bright light. She forced herself to take a deep breath in, count to four, and let it our again slowly. She needed time to think. 

“Sorry,” she said, “I, uh.” She was still cold, and it was _ridiculous_ that she should be cold. _Discovery_ was temperature controlled. “I may not be fully rested. I will go sleep. In my quarters, if that’s alright.” 

Culber ran his tricorder over her, tapped the screen, then ran it again. “I suppose,” he said. “Your biometrics are within acceptable range. Get Tilly to take you there, though. I don’t want you collapsing in the hallway if you get dizzy again.” 

Michael thought about protesting, then obediently held out the crook of her arm to Tilly, who tucked her hand into it, and hauled her upright. Tilly gently steered her out of sickbay toward the neared turbolift, and placidly watched the door hiss closed. 

“So,” she said. “What are we lying to Culber and Stamets about?” 

Michael blinked. Tilly looked up at her, expectantly. 

“Something occurred to me. I need to think. Alone.” 

“Yeah,” said Tilly. “Or you could talk to me about it. I wont say anything to anyone if you don’t want me to. Sometimes I feel like it helps to say things out loud, you know? It helps me think.” 

To a Vulcan, the first step toward logic was to achieve _s’thaupi,_ the state of mind beyond the confines of the body. It was about isolation, separating your emotions from the physical response to them, separating your thoughts from your emotions. There was a calm, lone place inside everyone, Surak taught, and with practice it was not needful to go alone into Vulcan’s Forge to achieve it, nor to set out the full candle-circle of the _yel-halek-kuv_ and sit for hours while the stars traced the same circle overhead. These were an aid, and Michael had needed the aid, every time; she was merely human, and the grief she’d felt for her parents when she first came to Vulcan had been a vicious snarling thing that would not leave her in peace. She could not meditate like a Vulcan, but over time, she’d taught herself to approximate the _s’thaupi._ Every year, on the anniversary of her parents death, she would excuse herself, and sit on the patio outside Sarek and Amanda’s home, still warm from the afternoon suns, and watch the night sky over Vulcan. Perhaps that was what Surak meant, after all, she’d thought; not a gap between the body and the mind, but the gap between the self and other, the knowledge that her emotions were hers alone to hold and expunge within the confines of herself. 

“I don’t -” she began to say as Tilly bustled her down the narrow corridor to their room. 

“Hang on,” Tilly said, depositing Michael on her bed and keying a request for tea into the replicator. Tilly shoved the warm cup into Michael’s hands, and plopped down on the bed beside her. “Ok, go.” 

Michael looked at Tilly’s face, the small, concerned wrinkle between her eyebrows as she added a heaping spoonful of sugar to Michael’s cup, and told her everything. 

—

Lorca was in his quarters when Michael asked the computer, and she allowed herself a moment to fold her hands neatly behind her back and compose her arguments before requesting entry. Lorca was behind his desk, tapping something into his terminal while his tribble cooed softly atop a PADD. 

“Specialist Burnham. I see you got back in one piece. What can I do for you?” 

“I spoke to Tilly,” she hedged. 

“Yes, that’s almost unavoidable. Sit,” he gestured at the bowl of fortune cookies and she demurred. 

“Lieutenant Stamets, Cadet Tilly, and I would like to try and intercept a Klingon Bird of Prey. Cadet Tilly believes that with an in-depth scan of the drive system we can patch the holes in the schematics we rescued from Iridin. The Iridin drive would also run on dilithium, but would be a significant improvement on our current drive. Not as fast as the spore drive, but we would be able to replicate it, and disseminate it to the rest of the fleet. Cadet Tilly believes this could turn the tide of the war, and I agree.” 

Lorca hummed noncommittally, then increased the light a notch, before moving the tribble to one side. He shoved the PADD across the table at Michael. 

“You have a plan for getting that drive?”

Michael accessed the file she’d drawn up from the Norn’s equations. She’d locked it to her personal code, and she slid the PADD back to Lorca quickly, to preempt the urge to delete it, to try and forget. 

“Tilly helped me map out the practical mechanics,” she said quietly. “But the electroconduits themselves are based my equations. The ones the Norn gave me.” 

Lorca reached under the table, drew out a phaser, and blasted the PADD into an acrid-smelling cloud of sparks. Burnham instinctively launched herself backwards, chair screeching against the floor as she stood up. 

“I trust that concludes our conversation,” Lorca told her calmly.

Michael stood frozen, utterly blank for a second, then pushed the chair back to the desk and sat down. “No,” she said. “This is my choice -”

“You’re asking your Captain’s permission for a military manoeuvre, and my answer is no, Burnham.”

“It’s foremost a scientific endeavour -” she protested.

“And I’m telling you _no._ ” Lorca leaned in, eyes glittering in the half-light. “Are you going to disobey your captain?” 

Michael had lived her last hours aboard the _Shenzhou_ over in her mind a hundred times, each time an anguish of details. The sound of Detmer tapping at her screen, Saru pacing, the angled bone of Philippa’s shoulder biting into her fingertips as she nerve-pinched her. Each sharp and vivid, a momentary bridge back to a moment she could never change. Distantly, she wondered if this would become such a moment; if she’d lie in bed weeks from now, tensed against the memory of Lorca’s hand almost touching her sleeve. 

“You told me it was my choice,” she said. “Let me do what the Norn told you I am meant to. Let me help you end this war.”

“I was counting on you to make the right choice, instead of blindly chasing after vengeance for a person who is already _dead._ ” 

Michael took a deep breath, and exhaled through her nose before speaking. “This isn’t about Philippa -”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course it’s about Philippa. You were ready to rot in prison for sheer guilt, and every time you step through the door to my quarters I can see you wince like a kicked dog because some part of you thinks I’ll be her, every single time, and _I’m not._ You were offered vengeance, and you can lie to yourself about how much you want it, but you can’t lie to _me._ Come.” He stood, and motioned for her to follow him. He moved towards the door to his private quarters, went through, and then opened a second door leading off them. Michael stood still by his desk. Lorca made an impatient gesture, and she walked slowly over. 

Michael caught a brief glimpse of Lorca’s sleeping quarters, stark and sparse, before following him into the adjoining room. For a moment, she thought she’d somehow ended up in the ship’s armoury, weapons neatly resting in rows upon rows of hooks on the walls, floor to ceiling. She recognised a Vulcan _lirpa_ on a double row of hooks, and reached for it curiously, then saw the canister of dark matter above it, a cruelly humming Orion disintegrator, a sleek, black gun she had no name for -

It was like suddenly seeing the obverse of an optical illusion, the benign armoury turned menacing, filled with the most vicious methods of inflicting pain, dismemberment and death. Almost everything in the room she recognised was banned within Federation space, and their presence made even the relatively harmless objects like the carbon monofibre body plate and the Surakian diagram of psi-points seem filled with horrific potential. 

“I’ve been collecting these since the _Buran,_ ” Lorca said. “All command staff were briefed on methods of Klingon interrogation after the Binaries, so we’d know what we might be asked to endure, and could - prepare ourselves. As much as you can prepare yourself for something like that, which isn’t much, I can tell you now. I thought I was ready. If I had to, I would have held out as long as I could and trusted Starfleet to come for me. When the Klingons caught the _Buran,_ I realised I’d been wrong all along. I shouldn’t have been preparing myself, I should have been preparing the crew. My tactical officer suggested we surrender. _Surrender!_ They’d carve him up like a piece of meat, and he had no idea.” Lorca picked the sleek gun off the wall and turned it over in his hands, pensive. “Tell me, Michael,” he asked, “which weapon in here do you think is the deadliest?” 

Michael looked over the weapons. After a few moments, she pointed at the dark matter. 

“Wrong,” said Lorca. “It’s you, of course. You, and the entire crew of the _Discovery._ The brightest minds of the Federation, honed to an edge that will dissect the Klingon empire. This, these weapons, is what you’re up against. I won’t let what happened to the _Buran_ happen to you. I’ll make you ready to fight them and win. But you have to give me time. You have to trust me. The Norns cost me my last crew, and I will not lose you.” He said the last almost gently, and Michael looked down, unable to meet his gaze. She ran her fingers along the top of a glass case next to the door. Inside, vials filled with various coloured liquids shone within like tiny gems. 

She forced herself to speak. “As I was saying, this isn’t about Philippa. I wasn’t going to use the equations. But Stamets is dying, Ash is tearing himself up trying to fight the Klingons, Tilly - Tilly is _so kind,_ still, and speaking to her - she should not have to become a weapon. None of us should.” She looked up from the case to find him looking at her, expression impossible to read. “If you won’t let me go after the drive personally, I’ll send the trap schematics to Starfleet High Command. They will not ignore the intelligence, regardless of its provenance. I was willing to go to prison once to do what I thought was necessary to end this war. I will do so again.” She cleared her throat, and said, somewhat more unsteadily, “I would prefer not to be sent away from _Discovery._ ”

Lorca turned from her, carefully placing the gun back on the wall. His shoulders were tensed, she could tell, but his face was hidden. “Get out,” he told her, in a flat voice. 

Lorca had rescued her, given her a place aboard _Discovery,_ a purpose when she thought the rest of her life would be spent merely waiting to die. She did not want to be a weapon, but if she wasn’t Lorca’s weapon, she would be nothing. It was the trade she’d been prepared to make, coming to his office, but she was caught off-guard by how much she’d needed his approval, how much the absence of it left her off-balance. Blindly, she turned to leave. 

“I’ll think about it,” Lorca said quietly, behind her. She bit down on a near-sob of relief, and went. 

—

It was an oddly somber meeting the next morning. Stamets was all but propped up against Culber at the far end of the table, looking likely to collapse any moment. Saru kept nervously fiddling with the ridges of his ganglia and shooting sidelong glances at Lorca, who’d leaned back in his chair, and crossed his arms. He was looking flatly displeased as Tilly and Michael presented their idea for a trap to ensnare a Klingon Bird of Prey. The rest of the bridge crew and ranking officers were all hiding behind their PADDs, or in the case of Owosekun and Detmer, staring at the holograms with near manic focus. 

“- we do need a lure to lead the Klingon ship through the trap, and a landing party to beam aboard and scan the drive,” Tilly finished, “but generally, we really think it’ll work.”

The room was very quiet. 

Lorca nodded. “Fine. Starbase three’s only a few lightyears’ out, they’re still fixing up some damaged long-distance haulers from the Nivalla raid. I’ll put in a request to mock up one of them as a federation weapons transport to use as bait.” 

Saru stopped fidgeting, and Michael smiled at him. 

Airiam cleared xir throat. “We cannot assume their drive core is similarly placed, or even visually similar to either of the Federation drive prototypes. We must be prepared to buy the landing team as much time as possible to identify the correct technology. We cannot assume another ship will be so easily lured.” 

“Based on the drive schematics from Iridin, we can roughly guess what the Klingon drive looks like,” Stamets said. “Where it is, on the other hand -”

“Second deck, behind the double plating over forward torpedo bay,” Tyler said. 

Lorca narrowed his eyes at him briefly, then shrugged. “That simplifies matters some. Take point on the away team, Lieutenant Tyler.”

“I request permission to go as well,” Michael said. “We performed a similar mission successfully on the _Ship of the Dead._ ”

“Fine,” said Lorca. “Lieutenant Stamets, status on the spore drive. Go.”

Stamets gave his entire report sitting, and both Enythek and Culber kept throwing worried glances at him throughout. The mere fact that Lorca let Culber’s presence slide, despite the fact that he wasn’t a ranking officer, was a testament to how much Iridin had taken out of Stamets. Perhaps because Stamets was notably exhausted, the meeting ended shortly afterwards.

Once Lorca had given them the go-ahead, it took the _Discovery_ crew a surprisingly short time to put the trap together. Engineering managed to mock up a credible semi-injured weapons transport within the week, and most of the spore drive crew were temporarily reassigned to building Michael and Tilly’s net. The major design problem was that any circle wide enough for a Bird of Prey to pass through with a margin of error was too large to build and transport on the _Discovery,_ and building it on site incurred the risk of Klingon discovery. Finally, Tyler and Tilly managed to come up with a system that allowed the ring to fold up into the cargo bay of _Discovery,_ and which would snap it into shape and hold when a system of fibre cables were pulled. According to them, it was based on some sort of ship rigging. The trap itself would drain all the dilithium and electricity based systems on board. This would leave the ship dead in the water for seven minutes give or take a few seconds, at which point the Klingon ship would have generated enough energy to boot up the engine again. Life support and gravity would both be down. The Klingon vessels passing through the quadrant did so erratically, and so Michael and Tyler began to sleep with their magnetic boots, phasers, and body plating next to them, waiting for the long-range scanners to go off, and a ship to come within trapping range. 

When the sensors finally did chime, however, they were not asleep, but on the bridge. As soon as Owosekun announced the incoming ship, there was a flurry of movement. Michael and Tyler sprinted for the transporter room, and were dissolved the instant they stepped onto the pad, appearing on the fake weapons transport mid-run. A small complement of crew had been staying on the transport, and Michael felt the slight tug as they steered the ship away from _Discovery,_ behind the unnoticeably slender circle of the completed ring, which was being angled toward the trajectory of the incoming ship. 

" _Good luck,_ ” said Lorca over their comms. “ _See you in eight minutes._ Discovery _is warping out of sensor range in three, two, one -_ ” 

Michael bent to check that her boots were properly strapped to her legs, then made sure her phaser was securely set to stun. 

“Let me?” Ash asked, then ran his hands along her sides, testing the fastenings on her armour, her emergency filters and collapsible helm for if the Klingons decided to manually vent parts of the ship into space. Michael returned the favour once her was done. The ends of his hair brushed against her hands as she checked the filters on the back of his neck, and she allowed herself a quick moment to rest her forehead against his, revelling in how solid he felt beneath her hands, the soft brush of his hair against her cheek. 

They broke apart, kneeling on the transporter pad, weapons drawn, and waited. Seconds ticked by, and Michael tried not to think of what would happen if the Klingons realised they were being tricked. The weapons transport was a deliberately easy target. If the trap didn’t work, or if the Klingons altered course around it, their weapons would tear through the hull of the transport like bullets through paper. She counted her breaths, going in, going out. A telltale flicker of white light appeared in the corner of her eye. Her limbs grew weightless as they beamed into the pitch black interior of the dead Klingon ship. 

She clicked on her boots, and softly touched down on what she presumed was the metal sheathing which dominated Klingon ship design. Without the faint hum of the thousand systems it took to keep a ship alive and moving through space, the room was eerily silent. Michael could hear her own heartbeat, unnaturally loud to her ears, and the buzz of her phaser vibrating up through her palms. Apparently satisfied by the silence that they were alone, Tyler flicked on his head torch. They were standing in a narrow corridor, with unmarked corrugated doors on either side. Long pipes ran along the ceiling, and Michael could make out the angular geometric script of Klingon stamped on them. Tyler stood from his low crouch, and gestured for her to follow him as he confidently took off down the hallway. 

The ship creaked about them as they moved, responding to the faint pressure change that came with the loss of life support. It was already noticeably warmer than when they’d beamed aboard, with the residual heat from the engines leaching into the main body of the spaceship unchecked. Michael took her hand off her phaser for a moment to wipe the sweat from her eyes. They’d beamed into a maintenance hallway that was unlikely to be guarded, only one deck up from the drive core. As they moved downwards, Michael heard faint Klingon voices, far off. Down the corridor, around the corner was a door, and Michael took up position alongside it as Tyler rerouted local power from his tricorder to the control pad to make it open. The control pad flickered uselessly for a few seconds, and then the door hissed open. On the other side, the voices were much louder and much closer. Michael swore internally, and instantly clicked off her light while Tyler did the same. It was too late. The corridor didn’t return to darkness; down the hallway ahead, a glimmer of light grew steadily stronger around the corner, and the passage echoed with the heavy beat of multiple people running in magnetic boots. 

She and Tyler shared a brief look, then took off back the way they’d come. Tyler pulled ahead a little, taking the corners tighter than she did, and led her past the hall they’d materialised in, into a large hall spanning multiple decks. They were on a walkway three decks up, under an intricately detailed vaulted ceiling. Great, silvery canisters lined the floor further down. Michael assumed they were the coolant tanks. Tyler swung himself over the edge of the walkway and began running downwards along the wall. Even knowing they were in zero gravity, Michael felt faintly nauseous for a moment as her brain reoriented itself, and then followed him over. Instead of going through the door to the next deck down, as she’d assumed, Tyler continued running until he reached the canisters, and then righted himself to stand on the floor of the ship. He gave Michael a hand to help pull herself upright again, then dragged her through an unobtrusive hatch near floor level. 

Tyler shut the hatch behind them as soon as they were inside. It was immediately completely dark again. The vent they were in was barely big enough for the both of them, and smelled stale and metallic. Michael tried to breathe as quietly as possible. She could hear the Klingons moving around on the walls outside. Tyler reached down and disengaged the magnetic seal on her boots, then did the same for himself. He reached out for her, touched her elbow, and trailed his fingers down to her hand, which he then guided to grip his ankle. He was shivering, and she squeezed his hand in what she hoped was a comforting way. Then he aligned himself along the vent, and began pulling himself forwards, dragging Michael after him. 

Michael risked hitting the little button on the side of her watch to see how much time they had left before the systems came online. Four minutes and twenty seconds until gravity, heat and air was back, said the ticking numbers, and another ten seconds for auxiliary systems. The vent was ghostly blue in her watch light, and she turned it back off, trusting in Ash, who was pulling them along at a good clip. What little she’d seen of the passage confirmed her initial suspicion that they were in the safety vents, designed to suck any potential engine fires into space by exposing them to vacuum. She hoped desperately Tyler knew what he was doing, or they might accidentally end up drifting in space. Still, his knowledge of the Klingon ship had been uncannily perfect so far, and though she wouldn’t ask, she thought this might be his gift from the Norn, and his choice to use it. Idly, she wondered why the ship schematics had been a song to him; perhaps the Norn encoded the information into their brains in a way that spoke to their minds most efficiently. She’d gotten math, clean lines and graceful sense, and Ash had gotten a song that became a ship, and she loved him a little more for it. 

“Here,” he whispered, after they’d climbed up for another minute or so. The hatch was apparently much more difficult to open from the inside. Tyler struggled with it for a few moments before it opened with a too-loud clank. Michael winced. The room outside was quiet, save the groaning of the far wall, which doubled as the ship’s hull, and Tyler turned on his light. He pointed out a golden, sharp-edged octagon table a little over a meter tall, decorated with the same fine etchings Michael had seen on the beacon. As she had been then, she was struck by the beauty and intricacy of it; thousands of tiny rivulets etched cleanly into graceful swoops of metal like the arched wings of a great bird. Michael hooked the memory bank she’d brought along up to a port in the octagon. It took her a little over two minutes to get the memory bank to access, boot up power, and begin storing the drive data through the unfamiliar interface. She could feel the seconds draining away as the memory bank hummed, and had to stop herself from pacing restlessly. Ash was running an oddly reverent hand across the panel. 

“These are the markings of House T’Kuvma,” he said, half to himself. “The old markings of Kahless - I thought no one was left of that house. Perhaps House Mo’Kai...” he trailed off, stumbling backwards away from the panel, the color leeching from his face.

“Ash!” Michael said, reaching out to catch him as his knees gave way. His eyes were wide with unmitigated horror. She wondered if this was what she’d looked like to Tilly, Stamets and Culber when the equations hit her; blank and slack as her mind struggled to keep up. Perhaps not, Ash was still not speaking, and she’d come out of it, after all, come out of it quick - why wasn’t he? 

Michael got no warning before the main door to the drive room was pried open, revealing curved passageway that ran alongside the hull wall. She loosened her grip on Ash, who crumpled to the floor, and pulled her phaser. A single Klingon stepped through the opening, weapon trained on her. She was at least half again as tall as she was, and fully armoured, with the same saw-tooth ornamentation on her shoulder plates that L’Rell had worn. There was a long, curved weapon strapped to his back that Michael recognised from her fight with Kol, but she seemed disinclined to draw it. At a guess, she was older than either Kol or L’Rell, with fewer visible scars, and she tracked the movement of Michael’s phaser with unerring focus. Michael abandoned her plan to provoke her into a duel and began carefully moving sideways, away from Ash. 

“Do not move,” said the Klingon. “Put down your weapon.”

“Put down yours,” Michael told her, but stopped moving. She’d gotten far enough that Ash might be able to flank the Klingon. 

“Do you think one shot from that will be enough to stop me? I do not.” 

“I’m willing to find out,” Michael said. “I know how you treat prisoners in your care, and I will risk death before surrender.”

The Klingon shrugged. “You are like your captain in this. So be it.”

Michael got the first shot off, but the Klingon was quicker, ducking to the side and catching the phaser blast across the side of her armour instead of square in the chest. She let out a short grunt of pain, but kept moving. Michael brought around her phaser for a second shot, but instead of pausing to fire, the Klingon pulled a long knife from a hidden holster inside her thigh-plate. She knelt, holding the point of it to Ash’s exposed throat. 

“Do you think one shot will be enough to stop me?” the Klingon asked again. 

Lorca had killed three-hundred sixty-two people on the _Buran_ rather than give them into Klingon custody. Ash had been tortured viciously enough that the dermal regenerator couldn’t remove all his scars; there were faint lines of paler brown along his thighs, ribs and forearms that would remain all his life. He’d told her he made a choice to survive that, once, and that he was glad he had. Michael lowered her phaser. 

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t.” 

“Put it on the floor,” the Klingon said, and she bent, carefully placing the phaser on the ground.

Ash made an incoherent noise, then turned his head despite the blade at his throat. “Michael?” he asked. 

“I’m here,” she told him. “Lie still.” 

He blinked, and looked up the blade as the Klingon bent over him. An unsettling look came over his face; some of the open expressiveness drained from his mouth and eyes, like a light being shuttered. Ash tilted up his chin defiantly and gripped the Klingon’s wrist, angling the point of the blade up, just under his chin. 

“I am Voq, son of None, torchbearer of T’Kuvma,” he said in the strange double-cadence of the universal translator’s Klingon subroutine. “L’Rell Mo’Kai’vo offered me the aid of your House. Kill me and be forsworn.” 

“You lie cleverly,” the Klingon said. “But a Klingon who’s only Klingon when caught is hardly worth the aid of House Mo’Kai. Yet, perhaps if you were to aid _us..._ ” the Klingon paused lazily, and Michael was reminded of her brother’s pet sehlat, who’d enjoyed toying mercilessly with small vermin. “We suspect a spy from your Federation has infiltrated House Antaak. Tell me, _whom do we seek?_ ”

Ash sat up a little farther, pressing his throat onto the knife hard enough that a drop of blood trickled into his beard. “ _Kahless._ ”

“How do we find him?” The Klingon lowered the knife a little, and spoke with the same odd intensity that had come over Ash. 

“Together.” 

“Give us light to see -” 

Michael dove for her phaser. She took the jolt of the impact directly to her ribs to save time bringing up her arms and aiming. The Klingon whirled on her. Michael spared herself a second to focus, then shot the Klingon in the exposed gap over her neck plate. She dropped to the floor with a heavy metallic thud. 

“- forever,” Ash said. Slowly, he got to his feet. Michael winced at her bruised ribs, and used the console to pull herself upright as well. 

“The Norn taught you Klingon,” she said. 

“You know that isn’t true,” said Ash. 

“We don’t have time. The ship will be back online in thirty seconds. We need to get the drive, and get out of here -”

Ash grabbed her shoulder, and she winced. He dropped his hand like he’d been stung. The blood from the cut in his neck was running down his throat, tracing the hollow of his clavicle. Michael watched it, unable to meet his eyes. 

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I am Voq, son of None. What place is there for me on a Federation ship? You’d have me sell out my own people?”

“How long have you known?” Michael choked out. “How long have you known you were a Klingon spy, that you were -” 

“I’ve had flashes of memory since the Norn. I thought they were was implanted by her, but -” he laughed ruefully, and despite herself, Michael looked up at him. “It was the other way around. There’s this whole other person I was, and Ash was just layered on top of that to fool the Federation. To fool _you._ ” 

Michael stumbled gracelessly backwards, towards the hallway, and Ash grabbed her arm again, twisting her wrist into a lock that made her drop her phaser. He reached for her throat with his other hand, forcing her further backwards. His fingers closed around her windpipe, not tight enough to cut off the airflow, just tight enough to hurt. She’d never quite noticed how imposing he was before, standing at his full height.

“Ash,” she choked out, furious with herself for still wanting to gather him in her arms, despite that fact that he was Voq, who had tried to kill her once, who’d held her back when Philippa was killed. 

He pulled out his phaser with his free hand, sliding the power up to full with his thumb. 

“You killed T’Kuvma,” he said. “He was going to _save us,_ and you killed him. I ought to avenge him. I should kill you now -” he pushed the mouth of his phaser to her temple. His face was close enough that his breath was warm on her face. Michael reached up to cover the hand on her throat with her own. She could feel the familiar callouses on his fingers. For a horrible, suspended moment, they both waited. Around them, the ship hummed to life. 

Ash made an odd, aborted noise. Smoothly, he flicked the switch on her helmet, and shoved her roughly back into the hallway as the visor clicked into place over her face. He pulled something small and dark from his belt pouch and rolled it into the hallway behind her, before slamming the door shut. There was a flash of light, a wave of heat. Michael barely registered that a three meter cross section of the hull of the ship was gone before she was vented into empty space.


	3. Chapter 3

When she was seven, Michael had gotten lost in the woods of Doctari Alpha. It was one of the colony’s rare days of sun, and the scientists tended to take time off whenever the weather was kind to enjoy the natural light. Michael’s parents had driven to a nearby lake for a picnic, and after eating, Michael had wandered off into the forest to explore. She hadn’t meant to go far, but it was hard to pretend to be Captain Archer, seeking out new life and civilizations, when she could still hear her parents' conversation drifting through the trees. A little further in, then, and there was a glade where the sunlight came down through the branches in thick beams of gold, and beyond that the trees were covered in moss and tiny bone-white mushroom caps. She’d forgotten to be Archer after a little while, and was just Michael discovering things for herself. 

Years later, Michael always remembered the moment where she realised she couldn’t find her way back. Nothing had changed, but the wood seemed abruptly hushed with the sudden awareness that she was alone, and had no remedy for it. It was an echo of the same stillness that would come three weeks later when the Klingons left, and she was the only sentient being on a planet of corpses. Michael had always thought of the two events as linked, despite logic; part of a larger loneliness that pressed in at the edges of her life, the state of entropy she kept sliding into no matter how much she fought it. 

Falling through black space, she watched the _Discovery_ warp in to shield the transport barge from potential Klingon fire. The Klingon ship lingered for a moment, weighing the changed odds, then vanished. Michael bent her head to rest against the face plate of her helmet, and watched the stars spin past her, too numb even to cry. 

—

The _Discovery_ beamed her back soon after. Lorca, Culber and Tilly were waiting for her in the transport bay. Michael unsealed her helmet, wiped her eyes, and handed over the drive core to Lorca. 

“Tyler?” he asked, in a low voice. 

“Tyler was a cover for the Klingon agent named Voq, T’Kuvma’s second in command. He didn’t know. He _says_ he didn’t know.” Michael looked at a patch of wall just above Lorca’s shoulder. She kept her back very straight. “He elected to stay aboard the Klingon ship.”

Lorca gave her a curt nod. She folded her hands behind her back in parade rest. There was a brief, shocked moment of stillness. 

“Are you sure?” Tilly asked. “He seemed so - human.” 

“Yes, I’m sure,” Michael snapped, turning to face her. “You think I’d leave him there if I wasn’t? I know he seemed human!”

“Specialist,” Lorca said. “Look at me. Is he dead?” 

“No. He vented me out of the ship.” 

Lorca swore under his breath. “So the Klingons know the specs for the most advanced ship in the fleet, and the details of every mission we’ve planned a month ahead, or will soon. I need to contact Starfleet command _now._ ” He passed the drive off to Tilly, turned to leave, then faced Michael again. “We will discuss this later. Get sickbay to check you over.” 

Culber beamed them directly to sickbay, and Michael submitted quietly to his inspection of her ribs and throat. He didn’t speak for most of the examination, but handed her a wet tissue to wipe the dried tears off her face. Finally, fixing the marks on her trachea, he noncommittally remarked that the bruising pattern was a bit small for a Klingon hand. 

“Apparently not,” said Michael drily. 

“If you’d rather speak to Tilly about it, I understand,” said Culber after a few moments of silence, “but you should speak to someone. We all liked him. We all believed him. Give yourself the space to deal with this.”

“Vulcans believe meditation is the optimal response to such situations.” 

“That’s all very well for them, but you’re not Vulcan.”

“I _know!_ No one is providing me with any new information at _all._ ” She pushed the dermal regenerator away from her throat, and scrubbed at her eyes with the palms of her hands. “I’m going to go meditate, and if you want to help, you can get me Tyler’s medical records. If I can at least figure out how they made him seem human, perhaps that’ll go some way toward fixing the enormous damage I’ve just done to Starfleet by taking him onto that ship.”

Culber sighed, and stepped aside to let her pass. “I’ll come up with the records later,” he told her. “At least get some rest.” 

Michael thought about going to her quarters and trying to sleep, then headed down to the engineering deck. Tilly and Stamets were likely in the Spore lab, so she went down to one of the lower decks physics labs that the computer told her was unoccupied. There was always a pileup of data left unanalysed from the outposts and planets they visited, shunted aside for work more vital to the war effort. Michael called up the most recent log, and began sifting through it, labelling different datasets according to where she thought they’d be most useful. She got fifteen minutes into the log before realising she couldn’t afford the emotional luxury of avoiding thinking about Ash, and began writing out a list of all the projects she could remember telling him about in any detail. There was a knock on the door a while later. Enythek came in, and handed her a PADD.

“Thank you,” Michael said. “I am busy at the moment, but I will look over this as soon as I have time.” 

Enythek pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Culber sent you to talk to me. Look, I need to get this done. Right now the most important thing is making sure that whatever information Lieutenant Tyler - Voq - gives the Klingons is obsolete.” Michael turned back to the terminal, trying to re-focus on her list. 

“I’m here as a doctor,” Enythek said. “There’s a lot of information on that PADD, and even Doctor Culber and I misinterpreted it the first time around. You’re not a medical specialist, so I’m here to make sure you understand the implications of the scans.”

“I can’t -”

“Michael,” Enythek said. “Please, listen. You need to know this.”

Michael swallowed, and nodded. She turned away from the screen, and folded her hands neatly in her lap. Above the PADD, a blue holographic display of a human body turned, ghostly bones traced out in darker blue. Small, reddish-purple lines bisected most of the bones, and formed a fine mesh throughout most of the ghost-form, like roots filling the shape of a pot. 

“The torture they put him through was real,” Enythek began, pointing at the red lines. “Sections of his bones were removed, his cranial structure reconfigured almost entirely, and his internal organs are more scar than healthy tissue. Presumably, Voq consented to the surgeries, and I can find almost no injuries that, in hindsight, couldn’t be related to those. However, they left him conscious through the entire procedure to generate a very real memory of trauma. It’s likely that every memory Ash Tyler possesses is, in some way, a reflection of one of Voq’s experiences.”

Enythek touched the PADD, and the hologram body became a scan of a brain. “The technology used is phenomenally complex, miles beyond anything we can do, or would even think to screen for. My best guess is that whoever did this sealed away everything that happened before the surgeries, and replaced it with the conviction that his name was Ash Tyler, human Starfleet officer, and with the vague details of the biography of someone killed in action. They used some sort of directed positronic simulation on the parts of the brain regulating his subconscious to make it fill in the gaps.” 

“There was a real Ash Tyler?” 

Enythek looked up at her with more understanding that she was comfortable with. “Yes and no. There was a real Ash Tyler, but he wouldn’t have been the same as the Ash Tyler we knew. The details of our Tyler’s memories were constructed by Voq’s personality at the subconscious level. They’d feel real to him, because they are built and stored in the same parts of the brain as his real memories. He’s still essentially the same person, only now he can remember his Klingon life as well. Must be damned confusing, to be honest.” 

Michael shook her head. “They’re not the same person. I met Voq once. He was on the ship of the dead when I killed T’Kuvma. I fought him - he hated me. He wanted to kill me. He’s not Ash. Ash is dead, or a lie, but he isn’t Voq. You didn’t see his face when we fought. He deliberately followed a man who wanted to murder every single one of us rather than talk to us. _That’s_ who Voq is.”

“I didn’t see your face either,” Enythek said. “It wasn’t exactly a day that covered the Federation in glory.” Her voice raised in pitch a little, taking on the faint whistle Michael had sometimes noticed when Enythek was very stressed. “I’m sorry. That was unprofessional. This whole war is - difficult, for the Ynuk. We evolved as a species by interbreeding with anything that stood still long enough, so the idea of fighting for supremacy instead is, well, rather alien to us. I meant no offence.”

“You do realise that a species that is unwilling to even have a civil conversation for fear of being polluted is unlikely to ever embrace your ideals?”

Enythek gave her a wry smile. “In my experience, once you can have that civil conversation, the rest comes very naturally.” She stood, and stretched, her long, bone-plated spine making a soft scraping sound. “Right,” she said. “I will let you get back to your work. Take the PADD for now, and bring it back to medbay once you’re done with it.” 

“I will,” said Michael. She watched Enythek leave, then stared at the slowly turning scan of Ash for a long time. 

—

When Michael had finished up the list of all the engineering and science projects she knew had been compromised, Lorca was still speaking to Starfleet Command, according to the computer. She considered taking the medical PADD back down to Sickbay, but didn’t feel quite steady enough to apologise to Culber for yelling at him yet. Enythek’s pity was bad enough; apologising to Culber would mean accepting he was right, and that she should speak to someone. 

Michael meant to meditate in her quarters until she was meant to meet with Lorca, but instead found herself wandering along the officers’ levels. Ash’s room hadn’t been re-coded yet, and she let herself in. It was still and dark; as they’d left it six hours earlier, the bedspread wrinkled a little at the edge where Ash had sat to fasten his boots. She thought of asking the replicator for incense to perform her meditation there, but the room still smelled like Ash’s horrendous coffee habit and the oil she used to keep her hair soft, and part of her couldn’t bear to erase that yet, and part of her wanted to tear everything to shreds. Michael sat down with her back to the edge of the bed, and leaned her head back on the blanket. The ceiling was grey and featureless, and tiny motes of dust danced in the light coming in from space. _Kaiidth,_ she supposed, what was, was - it was illogical to resent the room for changing, to resent time for moving her further away from who she’d been just that morning. She would get up, and get to work. She was so angry with the Norns, with Ash, and underneath were feelings she couldn’t yet touch or catalogue, and she would get up and get to work. 

When the door slid open fifteen minutes later, Michael started guiltily. Lorca fixed upon her sitting on the floor, gestured for her to stay there, then shut the door behind him. He wandered over and sat down next to her, stretching out his legs with a tired sigh. The image of him sitting opposite her and Ash on his office floor months ago, warning them against the Norns, came back to her. Then, she’d felt it was a glimpse of rare honesty. She didn’t know how she felt now, having seen his hoard of weapons; she wondered how many more secrets he kept in abeyance to be doled out piecemeal whenever he needed to buy her trust. 

“I made a list of all the information I gave Ash,” Michael told Lorca, when he didn’t seem inclined to speak first. “Not just engineering projects. Details on Vulcan’s defences. Things I remember seeing, traveling with my parents to Starbases. Starfleet Command should know how much has been compromised.”

“They know,” Lorca said. “I told Lieutenant Tyler as much about how Starfleet’s weapons capabilities had developed over the seven months I thought he’d been out of commission as I could. I thought he had a real knack for tactics. Figured he’d make you a good First one day.” 

Lorca snorted at her look of surprise. “Oh, please. The conviction was never going to stick if we actually managed to win the war. Admiral Cornwell and I would make some noise about ‘invaluable contributions’ or something and get you reinstated. Besides, you didn’t hear it from me, but the longer the war drags on, the better you look for being tough on Klingons from day one. It’s not like you were wrong about wanting to wipe them out.” He leaned his head back like she had, and tugged irritably at his collar with a finger where it dug into his neck at the new angle, before giving in and unzipping his uniform jacket. 

“I mutinied nearly twice,” Michael carefully pointed out, “and then handed a Klingon double agent back to the enemy, despite my captain’s direct order not to. Prison would be logical.”

Lorca didn’t look at her, kept staring into the middle distance. She could make out the pale haze of the protective solution he hyposprayed directly into the pupil on bad days, like a faint mist overlaying his eyes. She’d heard other crew members wonder why he didn’t get it fixed, but never found it a particular mystery even before he’d revealed he couldn’t, that he’d bartered away his sight to the Norns. She carried Philippa’s insignia in her pocket even now. 

“I thought I was going to die, when they first brought me onto the _Ship of the Dead,_ ” Lorca said. “It wasn’t a surprise, I wasn’t going to tell them anything, I figured it was pretty much just a matter of how long I’d be tortured before they figured out I wasn’t going to break. Then, mercy of mercies, they put me in a cell with Tyler. You, Stamets, I knew how to get you as soon as the Norn told me your names. I knew roughly how you’d fit into my crew, I knew your service record. Tyler - he looked like an ordinary security officer on paper, and then he’d apparently died in the line of duty three weeks before the Norn told me his name. I reckoned he wasn’t dead, since that was the case, but I didn’t know how to find him, or why he was important.

“I knew I wasn’t going to die once he told me his name. He was perfect. Loyal, smart, brave, stubborn. Seven months on that ship, and he hadn’t broken. Even if he wasn’t going to win me a war I’d have wanted him for my crew. It wasn’t just you, Burnham. He was the perfect bait for _me_ , and I fell for it. If you listening to the Norn meant exposing him that much quicker then that’s the best thing those beasts have ever done for us,” he ended bitterly. 

“The other Ash Tyler is dead, Doctor Enythek says. I don’t know what that means for your gift. And - he didn’t kill me. He had a phaser to my head, but he was still _Ash_ enough that he couldn’t. I don’t know what that means.” It was like tripping down stairs, the way it all fell out of her in a tumbling rush. “I don’t know if I can trust myself anymore. Ash told me that I have to keep choosing, and trying to choose right, but I lost him, and Philippa. Voq still looked like Ash, and he didn’t kill me, and I don’t know how to let that go. I don’t know if he’s dead, or never existed, or I just left him on a Klingon ship after I promised I never would. I _trusted_ him! I miss him, and I don’t know how to stop.” 

Michael reached into her pocket with one hand and squeezed Philippa’s insignia hard enough that the edges cut into her palm. She breathed out. 

“I’m sorry,” she continued, calmer. “You were right about the Norns. I should have listened. I will continue to perform my duties adequately, and try to make up for my lapses in judgment as long as you allow.” 

“ _Michael,_ ” Lorca said, voice breaking, and perhaps that was it, that was real emotion. “Listen to me. You got the drive. The _Discovery_ was unharmed. Tyler was exposed before he could gather more information, no, look at me -” he touched her chin with two fingers, tilting her face toward him “- after the _Buran_ and the _Shenzhou,_ we have to trust ourselves to move forward, or there’s no point to any of it. I’d certainly appreciate you listening to me instead of threatening to mutiny next time we disagree, but here we are.”

“Your gift from the Norns -”

“Hang the Norns. Ash Tyler isn’t that uncommon a name. Hell, I’ll get Cadet Tilly to change hers, save us a trip back to Earth.” 

Michael wondered if the individual gifts had canceled each other out - if knowing one potential future changed past iterations to suit, and she’d inadvertently broken Lorca’s wish by using the equations. She wondered how the Norns’ minds worked - 

Michael blinked. Several pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t known she was assembling slotted into place. She could feel her face rearrange itself into a slightly hysterical smile. 

“Specialist Burnham?” Lorca asked. 

“We have to go back to Pleiad VI.” Lorca snapped his head around to look at her, and she quickly amended: “no, no, I’m not going to ask them for a boon. I’m going to give the colonists follow-up vaccinations so I can get up close to a Norn again.”

“I don’t know what sort of closure you want, but they prey on humans, Burnham.” Lorca said, still watching her very carefully. “I’m not taking you on a pleasure cruise so you can discuss what they know about Tyler.”

“I don’t care if they prey on humans.” That was a lie; she cared, she wanted to tear them apart for what they’d done to Ash, but it didn’t matter, _kaiidth._ Still, she frowned, abruptly realising both that Lorca would likely never accept her real reason for wanting to return to Pleiad VI, given his feelings about the Norns, and that his edging along the absolute border of what Starfleet deemed admissible on a good day was an enormous advantage to her. She flipped Philippa’s insignia over in her hand, running a fingertip over the inscription. She thought of Lorca’s private armoury, the sort of assumptions he was likely to make on incomplete information.

“I cannot tell you why I want to get up close to a Norn without triggering Starfleet mandatory reporting protocols,” she said truthfully. “I do not wish to get you courtmartialed as well. You told me to trust myself to move forwards. Please, trust me as well. This is for the good of the _Discovery_ crew.” 

Lorca stood up, and looked down at her with an odd glint in his eye, somewhere between assessment and satisfaction. “Alright,” he said after a few moments, offering a hand to pull her up as well. “We’ve got a rendezvous with the _Tereshkova_ to hand over drive schematics first, but I suppose making sure the colonists are properly vaccinated warrants a detour.”

—

The medical staff of the _Discovery_ were chattering happily as they beamed down, delighted at the easy mission that they assumed was meant to stand in for the shore leave no-one was getting in wartime. Michael and Stamets beamed down near the others, and watched in silence as Culber, Enythek, Saru, and Tilly helped set up the vaccination tables in the same town square where they’d worked last time. Children were weaving in and out amongst the legs of _Discovery_ crew members, laughing, and locals dressed in beautifully woven long tunics were unpacking tables and baskets of their own. They set small brown pastries and sliced fruit out, and what looked like red bean cakes with honey. The air smelled like flowers and fresh bread. Where a months ago, everyone had lined up for medicine quietly and sombrely, people were now chatting to each other in the lines and joking with the doctors. The whole thing had the air of a holiday. 

“The cordrazine will wear off soon. We should go,” Stamets said, watching Culber laugh at something a villager said. He didn’t move, though, and turned his head to look after Culber as Michael briefly took his elbow to help him down the steps leading off the town square. 

“Alright, alright,” he said, batting away her arm. “I’m dying, not _old._ ” 

Michael let him go first, wandering through the empty streets to the fields beyond the settlement. The long grass was still wet with dew, and it left her pants wet up to the knee as they walked through it toward the dark brow of the forest. Some violet alien flower she had no name for dotted the field, and Michael carefully picked one, sticking it in her tricorder pouch to analyse later. Neither did she recognise the trees of the forest, which were smoother than any other tree she’d seen; beech-like but darker of bark, with heavy, gold-rimmed leaves. They walked for a while in silence, Stamets occasionally checking his tricorder to make sure they were following the coordinates Lorca had given Michael. 

“How did you convince him to let us do this, anyway? I assumed you hadn’t told him, but he must have given the go-ahead for this mission, and -” he gestured at his tricorder. 

“He doesn’t know the details,” Michael said. “I think he assumes I’m off forming an illegal hit squad or something.”

“Well, that’s unnerving,” said Stamets. “Look, I realise that this is all extremely illegal, and I appreciate what you’re doing for me. And if it doesn’t work out -” 

“It will work out,” Burnham said. “It will.” 

She reached back into her tricorder pouch, brushing aside the flower, and touching the vial of blood they’d taken from Sickbay. She’d explained to Culber and Stamets about the Norns, and her idea of using Norn DNA to mediate between the tardigrade’s comprehension of a timeless multiverse and Stamets’ human brain. Part of the problem was making the three sets of DNA interface smoothly, and Culber had gone to fetch Enythek. 

“I’m not hearing this,” Enythek had said immediately, then: “without going into details, what do you need from me, _specifically,_ to make this work?” 

“A small portion of Ynuk DNA,” Michael had said, “and blanket permission for its use.”

“Are you going to clone me?” Enythek had asked.

Michael had shaken her head. 

“Hypothetically, if someone wanted my DNA, all medical personnel have access to the clean blood samples we keep on crew members - _all_ crew members - as a baseline for comparison in case of infection. I was thinking mine might accidentally have been contaminated, and I was thinking of redoing it tomorrow.” Enythek had nodded at Culber. “I’m relying on your common sense, here.” She’d walked back to her office, and shut the door firmly behind her.

The small vial of Ynuk blood should help prevent Stamets’ immune system from rebelling against the foreign elements, but off the _Discovery,_ in the sober natural sunlight, the whole plan seemed precariously stacked together. There was so much that could go wrong, starting with the fact that they were there to try and steal blood for a banned eugenics procedure from aliens that had proven near omniscient. 

The forest gave way to a lake, glassy and still in the hazy morning light. The edge of the water was barely visible, a faint shimmer above grey sand, that grew deeper and resolved into shifting patterns further out. The noise of the wind and chittering of birds had quieted, and the stillness felt suddenly oppressive, like a down-comforter pressed down over her ears and face, deadening the world outside. Michael bent to take her boots off, and was ankle deep in the lake, halfway through rolling up the legs of her uniform pants before she realised she didn’t know why she was doing so. Beside her, Stamets blinked at her, as if perplexed why she’d stopped - he was halfway into the water, small waves lapping at his calves. 

“What -” she began. 

“It’s fine, Michael,” Stamets said, and held out a hand for her to take. “It’s how they talk to us. I can see the lines they’re pulling.” 

“No,” said Michael, and looked down; she saw the net in the caustic patterns of light washing over her feet. Sarek was in her mind, but she owed him her life, she did not like to think of something cold and indifferent sorting through everything she was, erasing her free will, pulling her in. 

“I’m going,” Stamets said. “I have to at least try. For Hugh. You still have time to go form that hit squad instead if you want.”

Michael shook her head, but took his hand anyway. “You shouldn’t have to go alone.”

Stamets walked further into the water, which came up to their thighs, and then stopped rising. Michael waded through the water as quickly and silently as possible. It rippled around her legs and after her in a v-shape, thick about her legs, like she was trying to walk while wrapped in a heavy shroud. The lake was perfectly clear, and icy cold; her feet ached and went numb. She watched the sand billow up between her toes in small grey clouds, then looked around. The shore was gone, swallowed by the haze rising from the water, which was rapidly thickening into a heavy mist. They were alone in a colourless world. 

“Can you find a way back?” she asked Stamets. He turned his head to look at her with bone-white eyes. She dropped his hand, and took a step back, the splash muted by the fog. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Your eyes. They’re -”

“Filmed over. Hugh says they do that when I’m having an episode.”

Michael took his hand again, then ran her tricorder over him with her free hand. “You don’t have any pupils. They’re not filmed over, they’re gone. I suppose they’re just partially _elsewhere,_ supposing the tardigrade moves between dimensions. Can you still see?”

“Better than you can. The lake, the mycelial network, the other lakes in other universes. They’re all here. It’s remarkable. It’s like the mycelium roots have been woven together, here. It’s a lot denser than in most places.” 

Michael lifted the tricorder to run a more in-depth scan, then saw a black silhouette suspended in the mist over Stamets shoulder. 

“It’s a lot denser here because they _feed it,_ ” she said, and pulled out her phaser. 

A horse was hanging from a tree by the neck. Its back legs splayed unnaturally, and something dark dripped from the right hoof into the lake water. As they got closer, a grassy shore resolved itself beneath and behind the horse. Other trees came into view on either side, and Michael saw a hanging oxen, great horns curving up like polished obsidian, and a deer with a crown of antlers that had half-shed its velvet, the pelt peeling off in long, bloody strips. There were more trees, but she looked ahead, past the foam-flecked neck of the horse, where something moved. 

“Stamets,” she said. 

To her relief, he pulled out his phaser as well, handling it very gingerly. She edged out of the water, over the tapestry of fat black roots that fed into the lake. The grass was slick under her feet, and smelled like mud and rot. A breeze moved the horse’s mane, twisting the carcass on its rope so its wide, glazed eye took in the lake in one long sweep. The shoreline continued around what she could now see was a small island, ringed by nine trees, each with a different animal hanging from the branches. In the middle of the island a tenth tree grew, taller than the others, wide branches disappearing into the mist. Nestled between the roots of the tree sat a Norn. 

Stamets holstered his phaser, and walked over to her. Michael internally swore at him, before doing the same. She held him back by the shoulder when he made to walk within reach of the Norn, however. The Norn was wearing the same gossamer dress she had before, and she was moving her hands in a complicated pattern through empty air, completely engrossed. Stamets shrugged Michael off, and held his fingers out to the Norn, who looped hers around them like they were making an invisible cat’s cradle. The Norn looked up at her, and something flashed gold beneath her hands. Michael pulled out the small ampul she needed to fill. 

Her hands were shaking. The Norn sat there, unaffected, _calm_ \- 

“You didn’t tell me about Ash. You knew, didn’t you? And you just _let it happen._ Let me dig myself in deeper.” Michael heard herself speak as if from far away. Her voice was hoarse, she thought.

“She did know,” Stamets said, watching the empty spaces between his fingers, half absorption, half awe, the look on his face the same as when he tended to the mycelium forest, and she wanted to shake him, too, for not caring. “They all did.” 

“ _Why?_ ”

The Norn tapped a root with her bare foot.

“Is Captain Lorca right? Do you feed on human misery?” She could probably fill the ampul before the Norn could grab her. It was spring-loaded, a thin hollow needle on a pressurised vial that would suck out the blood before the Norn even felt pain. Michael wanted to jab it into the tender crook of the Norn’s arm to watch her wince. She wanted to run, and never come back. 

“She doesn’t understand in those terms. They’re symbionts. Like the tardigrade. It’s...” Stamets trailed off, making a frustrated noise. “The universe splits whenever we make a choice. It becomes two universes: one where you wear the green shirt, and one where you wear the blue. We came to this island or we didn’t. Tyler finds out he’s a Klingon, or he doesn’t. Most of those universes are very similar. It’s some sort of... entropy, certain people, certain things, tend to come out the same way. The mycelium network runs through all of these universes, but it needs different universes to expand. The Norns do too. They can’t exist in states of the universe that are too similar, or they cancel out. How much quantum physics did you do in the academy?”

Michael made herself stop and think over what Stamets had said, what Lorca had told her. “They make us make choices,” she said, finally. “It’s not about giving us things that will hurt us, specifically. They push people into situations where the choices they make create radically different universes. War, death, exploration - they’re uncertainties. They make us make hard choices. The kind of choices that split the universe right down the middle.”

“Yes,” said the Norn, slowly pulling Stamets’ hands closer to her with threads Michael couldn’t see. “We take gifts to feed the tapestry and these bodies, and give you what you want. The freedom to make the choice you want.”

“No you _don’t,_ ” Michael said. “Ash didn’t want to know -” she couldn’t make herself believe that, though. Ash had been Klingon before they met the Norns. She’d want to know, if it were her. “Let Stamets go.” 

Stamets’ eyes were still pure white, and he’d knelt before the Norn. His normally neat hair was tousled in the wind, and the black circles under his eyes stood out in vivid prominence. He fit into the image in a way Michael didn’t; fey-looking, one foot on another iteration of the island in another world. 

“I can see the thread, Michael,” he said. “It runs through everything living. It’s my life’s work, and I can touch it with my bare hands.” 

“We’re leaving.” Fluidly, Michael crouched by the Norn, flipping one hand over into a _suus mahna_ lock. She slid the sleeve of the Norn’s dress up her arm, and pushed the vial in her palm to the crook of the Norn’s elbow. It clicked. The Norn hissed, grabbing Michael’s shoulder with her free hand. Her nails dug into Michael’s flesh. She tried to wrench herself loose, but her shoulder had gone numb. The pins and needles spread, inching toward her heart. 

“Then do it, kill me,” she spat at the Norn. “This war won’t last forever, and when it ends, you’ll need explorers. You need people to see new worlds. You need people who will go further, and be braver, and make a thousand hard decisions that open up the mycelial network. You need Stamets, and he’s dying. So let us take this, and walk away.” 

She was shaking; big, hulking shivers that went straight through her. She saw her arm tremble as though from a distance, as though she’d shaken herself sheer out of her own body. Something warm wound its way around the aching indents the Norn’s fingers left on her shoulders; part of her illogically expected to look up and see Amanda, wrapping a blanket around her. Her head lolled back against Stamets’ arm, and he blinked down at her. Behind the clouds, his eyes were blue like the summer sky.

“Enough,” he told the Norn. “She’s right.”

“My blood. She owes me.” 

Stamets picked at her tricorder pouch, pulling out the flower. He opened his hand and spilled it into her lap.

“It’s not a proper gift,” the Norn said dubiously, running a blood-tipped nail across the petals. 

“What you gave me wasn’t either,” Michael said through chattering teeth. “I wanted none of this.”

Stamets plucked the ampul from the Norn’s arm where it clung like a small beetle. He pulled Michael up, and his side pressed against hers as he helped her toward the edge of the island warmed her somewhat. There was a soft touch to the exposed sliver of Michael’s neck above her uniform collar, like someone smoothing down the edge of an envelope, and she looked back. The Norn was still sitting by the tree. 

“Then choose,” she said, as Michael walked back into the mist, Stamets’ arm looped around her waist.

—

The cordrazine wore off as they were wading to the shore, and Michael synthesised the Norn and Ynuk DNA as best she could in the modified hypo Culber had given her. Enythek was turning a blind eye to their illegal eugenics experiments, but she was still responsible for what happened in sickbay; beaming aboard with the modifications already done would protect her and the rest of the medical staff. Michael injected the solution directly into the femoral artery, then called _Discovery_ to beam them aboard and contact Culber. Stamets’ eyes were clouding over again, gone from clear blue by the lake shore to milky when they coalesced on the emergency transporter pad in Sickbay. Michael’s arm was beginning to feel normal again, and she half-dragged, half-carried him to a cot, making room for Culber to beam in. 

“Step aside, Specialist,” he told her, snapping scanners in place, a holographic image rising above Stamets’ prone body like a mirror. She could see his circulatory system working, pumping tiny golden flecks throughout his body in the blue veins of the hologram, and watched as they were slowly dissolved adding a soft glow to the arteries. Stamets garbled something incoherent, and batted at the scanner. Culber caught his hand in his, holding it down as he grabbed a hypo off a nearby tray, tore the protective covering off with his teeth, and administered it one-handed. Michael grabbed Stamets’ other arm, and pushed down on it with all her weight.

“Come on, Paul,” Culber said, squeezing his hand. “Hang on.” 

Stamets’ back arched off the bed, and he kicked out, and there was a sense of space around her; the world branching out into infinity.

Michael blinked, and the room was dark, and Stamets was holding Culber in the corner, weeping into his hair and was he _dead_ -

Michael blinked, and the room was light, and Tilly was offering her grapes as she came back from Iridin - 

Stamets was thrashing about, and Culber was lying across his chest, trying to keep him from bucking off the cot. He was cradling Stamets’ head in one hand, smoothing his hair back. The part of Michael that remembered the cold space between worlds the Norn had plunged her into to give her knowledge from another branch of the universe could feel Stamets _flickering_ , like a badly tuned comm frequency, pushing visions at them from wherever he was.

Culber, Saru and Enythek were fighting five Klingons, trying to keep themselves between them and the handful of patients hooked up to dermal regenerators even as the largest Klingon sheared a long gash in Enythek’s hip - 

Culber thoughtfully tapped a bag of intravenous fluid with a leather-gloved hand as an Andorian shrieked and writhed on the floor swearing he’d tell him everything, everything - 

“Paul, come back. I’m right here. Listen to my voice,” Culber said, but even to Michael it was so far off; something happening to someone else, somewhere, and the sickening waves of disorientation kept coming.

Ash told Culber about dreams of starving in a graveyard of ships, and asked him to run the medical scans again, while Michael watched with poorly concealed worry -

Tilly getting her ankle splinted and laughing at something Culber said, the light glistening off her Command insignia - 

She was lying in one of the beds in sickbay, like a warped mirror of herself, cuts on her face, golden armour, and Ash was Voq and Voq was sitting on her bed saying something to her in Klingon and she laughed and touched his hand - 

Michael flicked her head irritably at the sound of someone humming badly off key, dragging her away. Voq dissolved, and she braced for the next vision, but it didn’t come. Stamets’ breathing evened out. She looked over at Culber, who was still humming, knuckles pale from holding on to Stamets. There was a last eddying pull, some vision trying to drag them in, but Culber brought the melody to a tuneless close, and gave Stamets hand a small squeeze. 

“Hugh,” Stamets said. “Either stop humming or get lost.” There was a faint white line bisecting one of his pupils, which were otherwise clear. 

Culber gave a wet laugh, and kissed Stamets’ forehead. There was still a faint opalescent sheen to the medical hologram, but the light had dimmed. 

“How are you feeling?” Michael asked.

“Sad. Happy. I feel grounded. I can’t - I could understand everything, I could see the spore network with my own eyes, and now it’s gone. The most incredible thing -” he trailed off, then looked down at his hand, still intertwined with Culber’s, and had the grace to look slightly sheepish. “I don’t know how the new DNA will interact with the spore drive, though. I’m still part tardigrade, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to jump -”

“Not until I’ve run every test ever invented you won’t,” Culber muttered, and Stamets looked up at him like he was something wholly new and wonderful, a rare kind of discovery. He cupped the back of Culber’s neck in his palm, and told him “thank you for bringing me home,” horribly earnest. Michael looked away. It was too much, all of a sudden, to watch their happiness; a blinding overexposure of love. She slumped onto an empty cot, and rubbed a tired hand across her face. She missed Ash. In some universe a degree off hers, he’d made a choice to tell her about his dreams. In some universe, an Ash that was also Voq had loved her. She wanted to be angry with the Norn, still, but instead she just felt achingly alone; her Ash hadn’t told her. Her Ash had very nearly killed her, and then pulled away, let her go. At least some of him was still _her Ash_ , and she had left him behind, and Enythek had said the torture was real, and all the Norn had done was give them a choice. Michael turned away from Culber and Stamets, hid her face, and wept.


	4. Chapter 4

Michael went alone to her quarters, after Culber had checked on the small, half-moon indents on her shoulder where the Norn’s nails had cut her. Tilly wasn’t there; probably she was still on Pleiad IV, though the copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ that Michael had lent her was lying on her bed. Michael picked it up, leafing idly through it, hearing the snippets her eyes settled on read in Amanda’s voice. She flipped the book over in her hands, thinking, _if you don't know where you are going, any road can take you there._ She set the book back down on Tilly’s cover. She’d moved a spare set of body plating into her closet while they were waiting for the proximity alert to go off and a Klingon ship to approach. It was still there. She carefully packed it into a duffel, along with some replicated field rations and what first-aid supplies she could synthesise. Tapping out a quick note to Tilly, she headed down to the docking bay where the long-distance shuttles were kept. 

She picked out one at the far end of the bay, a one-man shuttle engineered for week-long independent data-gathering missions. It wouldn’t stand up to any sort of Klingon bombardment, and completely lacked offensive capabilities. Still, it was fast, and had the best sensors the Federation could design; her best hope lay in avoiding both Klingon and Federation notice, anyway. Michael hefted her bag onto her shoulder more firmly, hoping that Lorca’s utter disinterest in most of the _Discovery’s_ scientific projects extended to minor data-collection. She rounded the teleport pads for emergency evacuations, only to find Tilly and Saru leaning against the hull of the shuttle.

“Told you she’d go for this one,” Tilly said.

“You did indeed,” Saru said, then, “leaving, Burnham?”

“How did you -” she trailed off, frowning at both of them, Tilly radiating smugness, Saru looking uncommonly pleased with himself.

Tilly reared out, unzipped the end pocket of Michael’s bag, and pulled out a small black tracker. “I figured you’d go try and get Ash back sooner or later.” 

Michael looked to Saru, who had his hands folded behind his back and was staring mildly down at her. “I wasn’t -”

“ _Please_ ,” he said. “Assume I’m not an idiot. Cadet Tilly was correct about everything else; a flawed hypothesis would not produce such reliable results. You are commandeering a fleet vessel to take on an unsanctioned mission, presumably into Klingon territory.” 

“I have to,” she said, and there was the certainty of purpose she hadn’t felt since the Binaries; the solid rock at her back. “I have to. I promised Ash I wouldn’t leave him. I know it sounds insane, but I have to at least try.” 

“I know -” Tilly began, but Saru cut her off with a quick wave of his hand, and she stopped abruptly, surprised. Saru was polite, so careful and polite always. 

“Michael,” he said, “Tyler is a Klingon spy. He chose once to remain with the Klingons. We all saw the bruises when you returned from that ship. You set your gut feelings above Starfleet regulations once, and it cost me - it cost both of us - the captain who would have shaped us into the best version of ourselves.”

“I’m going alone,” Michael said. “I think I can convince Ash to talk to me. I have to give him the chance. I know where he’d go for answers, but he might not stay for long, I have to go now. Saru, please. If I’m wrong, I’m the only one who’ll pay for it, this time.”

Saru watched her for a long moment, and she leaned a little to the side; his ganglia were hidden. “Captain Georgiou would have let you return for him,” he said, finally. “I think she would. Tyler meant it, when he asked to run with me on Iridin. He would have gone, even though he was human, and would have gotten very tired. He took his job as Chief of Security very seriously. I was less afraid when he was there.”

Impulsively, Michael reached out and squeezed his upper arm. He patted her on the shoulder a little awkwardly, then straightened. “Captain Lorca is currently in his quarters. I have left Lieutenant Detmer with the conn, but upon return to the bridge, I will sanction a three-day mission to retrieve data on…” he paused, tilting his head to one side. 

“Unusual mycelial entanglement in the Pleiad Systems,” Michael suggested.

“Quite. Be back before then. Good luck.” He nodded to both her and Tilly, and beamed himself back to the bridge from the evacuation transporter pads. 

“Come along,” said Tilly. “Better get our stuff on board.”

Michael watched Tilly open the shuttle door, an escaped tendril of her hair wafting in the hiss of escaping air. “Tilly -” she began.

Tilly turned around. “Look,” she said. “I get that you were really sad about Ash when you got back from the Bird of Prey, and that’s why you’ve been shoving everyone away, but you’re not the only one who misses him. I like Ash. He’s my _friend_ , and I’m _so angry_ he lied to me, and if there’s any chance he’s still Ash, I’m going. You can come if you want, but I am going to help get my friend back.” She paused, then said, as an afterthought: “you’re also going to need a second person to man the weapons systems if the Klingons catch you.” 

Tilly was tense as a bow, clearly deeply uncomfortable, but she wasn’t moving. Privately, Michael was reminded of Amanda; beneath all the softness and kindness of her foster mother had been the kind of unshakeable conviction that let her remain human even after all those years on Vulcan. 

“We’re going into Klingon territory,” Michael said. “The sector where the Binaries was fought. It’s probably still being watched by the Klingons - scavengers, if nothing else -“

“I’m going.”

“I know,” Michael said, and smiled at her. “Thank you.” 

—

They dropped out of warp at the edge of the battlefield. The great carcasses of the starships having been picked over by federation and Klingons both, yet there were still hundreds of recognisable craft. _T’Plana Hath, Yeager, Clarke, Edison, Shran, Europa,_ the names worn smooth and familiar like a string of old prayer beads, too many smaller vessels to recall - yet here they all were, and not like Michael had remembered at all. The ships were scarred with soot, left gaping open to the sky, great ribs flashing in the starlight, plundered warp cores like pitted, jagged maws, and oh, this was her work; as surely as if she’d torn their hearts out with her own hands, and nearest the Klingon beacon, the _Shenzhou_. The ship had broken almost in two. Beside her, Tilly made a soft, sad little sound, and Michael was suddenly, unreasonably angry: she hadn’t been there, she wasn’t on the _Shenzhou_ , what right did she have to grieve it? It was so hideously unfair, all of it. Michael drew out Philippa’s insignia and set it on the control panel. It shone in the light of the twin suns, mundane and tangible, and Michael looked at it for a moment, and then at the wreckage left where the Federation and the Klingons had found each other. A thousand years ago, humans didn’t know how the universe turned, Philippa had said. Michael bent her head and sighed. 

“It’s the beacon,” she said. “I can’t see any Klingon ships, but I’m going to take us up close, and go down in an EV suit to make sure. Can you keep any incoming Klingons off my back?” 

“Mmhm,” said Tilly, preoccupied with piloting the shuttle between a the debris. “If you hurry. There are a lot of hiding places for people who aren’t us, here. The scanners are a little useless. It’s - there are so many - I went to the memorials, of course, but you don’t think -”

“Tilly.”

“But you know that. I’ll stop talking. Go get your suit on.”

Michael stripped the jacket of her uniform and pulled on the EV, trying to focus on the mechanics of the task rather than how unlikely it was she’d even find Ash, going off fragments of half-remembered prayers, and her memories of the pale Klingon who’d tried to kill her: _Kahless, give us light_. Even if she did find him, what did she expect? Tearful apologies, a Klingon following her back to Starfleet? A knife to the throat? Ash had let her go, Voq hadn’t - she was risking her life, and Tilly’s, on the flip of a coin, a branching of the roots, and for what?

Tilly tossed her a communicator once she was suited up. “Stay in touch. If you’re not back in an hour, I’m following you in, and the Klingons can have the shuttle.”

“If I’m not back in an hour, you leave me behind,” Michael countered. “Because I’ll be dead. I mean it.”

“I’m not going to -”

“It’s an order,” Michael said quietly. “I can’t command you on an unsanctioned mission, but Tilly, that’s an order.”

Tilly didn’t reply, and opened the first hatch to the airlock. 

The _Discovery_ shuttle could get a lot closer to the debris field surrounding the binary stars than the _Shenzhou_ had been able to. Tilly had carefully manoeuvred them to the very edge of the magnetic scattering field, hoping to hide them from pursuit. Even in a small craft, there was, however, no way to the beacon that didn’t involve manoeuvring in a single EV suit. Michael wondered if it was by design, or if a later accident of gravity had shattered asteroids around the beacon and left it unharmed by miraculous happenstance. 

Despite everything, there was still pure delight in piloting an EV; something thoughtlessly wonderful in looping through clear space, weaving around asteroids in the thick orange starlight. The sky stretched out endlessly all around her. Philippa had kept a falcon with her family on earth, said it gave her joy to watch it fly unfettered. This was the same flavour of joy, Michael thought, and she felt a momentary stab of understanding for the nameless Klingon architect who’d given the beacon great golden wings to lift it. She landed on the surface of the beacon as quietly as she could, crouching down at the same time she clicked on her magnetic soles. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the beacon’s surface. Michael looked up at the suns. There was a glint of light on the far side of the debris field that might be an enemy ship, though she couldn’t tell at that distance. A few meters to her right, a section of the beacon twisted up into a sort of overhang. She thought that was where the Klingon had appeared from the first time she’d been on the beacon. 

Her breath was loud and rasping in her ears, magnified by the sealed helmet. The EV magnified her every movement into clumsy, sweeping arcs, legs jolting forward gracelessly with each step. Something clicked beneath her foot, and she froze. The ridges on the surface ahead of her rippled like waves as set of interlocking panels sliding open. Michael lowered herself into the opening they’d left, a small, dark cylinder. As she locked onto the floor of the tunnel, the panels above her slid closed again, leaving her to navigate by the ghostly glow of her helmet display. The walls of the cylinder left little space for movement. Anxiously, Michael examined the edges of the room, looking for an exit. The boosters of her suit brushed up against the wall behind her. Then, a hiss of air flooding the room as the floor slid downwards. Michael knelt on the platform, and unclipped her phaser from her leg holster. She was in an alcove off a large hall, taking up what seemed to her likely the entire interior of the beacon. The great arches on the surface were mirrored within, though more intricately carved - they twined around one another in long, golden braids, draping along the line of the vaulted ceiling. Along the edges of the room lay long casks, and on top of each stood a brazier burning with a clean, white light; a small echo of the blinding brightness of the beacon itself. A mausoleum as well as a beacon, perhaps. Only about half the braziers were lit. At the far end of the hall, Ash bowed before a cask, and touched it, and it flamed up beneath his hands. 

He looked terribly, wonderfully the same. Michael had been half-expecting the pale Klingon that nearly killed her on the _Ship of the Dead_. He looked tired, had a livid bruise on the half of his face the was visible, and was no longer in Starfleet uniform, but some sort of close-fitting black armor. Michael opened the lock on her EV helmet, discarded the heavy boosters, and switched the boots off. Ash looked over at her as she stepped off the platform. Even in the half-light, she could see the way he paused, very still, before turning his back on her to light the next brazier. 

“Ash,” she said, and the sound carried, awkwardly loud. “Voq,” she said, more controlled. 

He stepped up to a cask that had long lines of script on it, and saw-tooth engravings. Michael hadn’t much Klingon, but she could make out some dates, names - “TlaqH Mo’Kai,” Ash said conversationally, following her gaze. “Founder of her house. She followed Kahless when few others would.” He reached for the brazier, then pulled back, sighing, and looked at her, flat and expressionless. “Her descendants are out there, keeping an eye on the beacon, presumably getting ready to hunt down the _Discovery_. You’re not going to take me back to the Federation alive, Michael. I’m not going to rot in some cell somewhere while this war drags on.”

“You came alone,” Michael said. Slowly, as if approaching a skittish animal, she walked down the nave. “You came to this place alone, for answers. Enythek said… You’re still deciding what you want - let me help -”

He laughed, ugly and low. “I came alone because it was my job. I am T’Kuvma’s chosen successor. I was his torchbearer. I light the beacon, alone, and the twenty-four houses will know that the House of T’Kuvma has returned and that we will see any who wish to rule us crushed before we submit. Go home. I’m not coming.”

“You could help end this war. You know the Federation doesn’t want to see the Klingons destroyed, you know it.”

“There’s half a Klingon armada just on the other side of the astroid belt outside, Michael. This isn’t a discussion. You’re leaving, or they kill you.” 

We want peace -”

“Oh, _do_ we -” Ash said, stepping in, and Michael tilted up her chin to look at him. She kept her hand from her phaser, but dropped back into a subtle fighting stance. “You started this war. At every step, you wanted to kill us. You’re obsessed with honour, your first reaction when faced with something bigger than you is to tear its throat out, and ever since you got Philippa killed, you’ve been raring for Klingon blood - you pretend that’s not you, but it is. Lorca sees it, that’s why he likes you. I saw it. I didn’t like you because you were human, I liked you because you were Klingon - ”

“I am _nothing like_ -”

“ _You killed T’Kuvma!_ ” Ash’s voice broke. He reared back for a punch, and Michael brought up her forearm to deflect it. She jammed the arm back downwards into Ash’s hip joint and pushed while reaching for his ankle. Quickly he shifted back, and brought an elbow down on her - a little late, and they both went down. Michael scrabbled for purchase on the floor, ignoring the pain in her back. She moved up, reaching for the neckline of Ash’s tunic under his armour, using it as leverage to twist the edge of her wrist into his windpipe. He made a bubbling, choking noise, eyes going wide as he scratched at her arms. She let up, just for a moment. He bridged up, flipping them over, and tried to punch her again. She covered her head, took two blows to her ribs, then he got past her guard and struck her full on the cheek. She jabbed at the greening bruise on his face, in retaliation, and then there was little technique, just a flurry of shoving and grasping at they each tried to pin the other down. 

“Philippa,” she managed to say, all the ugly things she pushed down on a daily basis clogging her throat, “he killed my - and I was right, you were there to kill us, you’re killing us now -”

Michael couldn’t breathe, she kept pulling air in in ragged gasps and it wasn’t enough, and she bit down on Ash’s leather-clad shoulder and it tasted bitter and did nothing. His face was wet against her palm, and she was crying, too, she realised, but could not let up. If she stopped fighting him, he would go, and she would be left behind. She kneed him in the thigh and shoved at his chest; some horrible parody of intimacy. All the while he was fighting her back, clutching at her wrists, her hair. There was a knife strapped to his back, just under the edge of his armour. She touched the handle and shied away. He did not reach for it, and she was glad, she was angry enough to fight him forever. Instead, he pushed down on her arm, twisting it at an angle. She arched up off the floor. Above, the light flickered across the ceiling, and she thought, incongruously, of the first time she’d seen the beacon. How her first thought had been how beautiful it all was. She reached for Ash’s wrist and just held on; neither clutching him nor letting him go. He immediately pushed up, pinning her shoulder to the floor with his body weight, then realised she wasn’t throwing him off. He bent his head, panting with exertion, his face shadowed by his hair. 

“I wanted T’Kuvma dead,” Michael said. “I wanted every Klingon dead. Part of me still does. I don’t know how to… mediate, I suppose. I tried not to feel it. I don’t know how to make what I did right. Whether to atone in prison, or on the front lines, or whether there’s no forgiveness at all. I’ve been trying to make the other choice since then, trying to be what Philippa wanted; to fill the void she left. But she would have taken you back to Starfleet for trial. And I can’t - I can’t do that. I’m still just selfish enough not to want -” she shoved her face against his shoulder, and took a deep hiccuping breath. “I think that would be wrong.” 

Voq went dead still, then abruptly pushed off her, stumbled a few steps, and fell to his knees. His back was to her. His hands were open against the floor, shaking spasmodically, as if moved by some horrible impulse too consuming to fully express. It clawed its way out of his throat instead, a jagged yell that tapered off into several wheezing gasps for air. Michael sat up, watched him. 

“It was explained to me,” Voq said to the floor, “that the hatred I felt for the Klingons was a reflection of what I felt for the Federation. That I chose my torture, and it was a glorious sacrifice. But the dreams haven’t gone away.” 

After Doctari Alpha, Michael had been terrified of the dark, had imagined herself back in the empty night after the Klingons left every evening as she lay in bed. It was illogical, though, and she would not tell Sarek. He would be proud to have chosen her, she would make it so, make him glad to keep her. Amanda knew anyway, somehow, and she would leave the door open a crack after saying goodnight. It was the same feeling, watching Voq, as watching that thin beam of light, and that thought brought with it an idea. Michael walked over to where Voq had left the taper on Mo’Kai’s tomb, and re-lit it in the brazier. It smelled faintly of resin. The flame guttered, when she turned to the next tomb in line. She cupped it in her hand and carried it over. Atop the tomb lid was a carved stone effigy of a Klingon in full armour, one hand on the hilt of a _bat’leth_ , the other curling underneath the indent in which the brazier stood. Michael lit it, and it caught flickering blue. Carefully, she lit the remaining seven braziers along the walls, until the last one left was the great golden pit at the end of the nave.

“Not that one, not yet.” Voq said, and she wordlessly offered him the taper. He reached out and took it, pinched the flickering flame. “You returned for me.” he said. 

“Every road made one, and none left in darkness.” 

It was like she’d cut him, after all; something vital and unguarded laid bare on his face. “Mic _hael_ -“

“I know you can’t come back with me. But I promised -”

“I can’t. I _will_. When we end the war. When we’re all united under Kahless’ banner. When I figure out some other way to be Klingon. I’ll come back, Michael.”

That was nothing, Michael thought, and the war would never end, and he was leaving now. Still, he reached out and touched her cheek. She shut her eyes and turned her face to his palm, imagining the beacon lit again, the dead ships outside cast in the light of a new, cold sun, all her choices illuminated. 

“Yes,” she said, and believed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, guys. Feedback always appreciated.


End file.
